Marcus

Installing KiCAD on Mac OS X

8 December 2011 Tinkering
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Recently I got more and more fed up by EAGLE CAD. It is a good EDA tool. But the restrictions are really starting to bother me. I need to do more 4 layer boards. Perhaps bigger boards. And I do not want to invest some thousand Euros just to be able to design bigger boards [...]

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Developing a LED & Motion installation

2 December 2011 Projects
The Interactive Matter HL1606 installation

You may know that the whole spring and summer has been a bit quiet over here at Interactive Matter. And again for a reason. I was asked by a friend to build the electronics for a massive LED installation for the  ‘Hsinchu Biomedical Science Park Exhibition Center’. The result was very impressive: An 10 meter [...]

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Blinken Button for Beginners Version 2

17 June 2011 Projects
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You may know the Blinken Button for Beginners Kit. And you may know that I am quite out of stock at the moment.  But things are changing: The new Blinken Button Kits have arrived! The best: The now come in red or green (Jimmy liked it – so I added this option) and I got [...]

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Twitballoon 2

20 May 2011 Internet of Things
Twtiballoon 2

It was time again to talk at the Good School ‘Camp Digital’ about the Internet of Things. Instead of choosing a real world example I choose to revive the good old ‘Twitballon‘ and create a new and improved version. Twitballoon is a simple Arduino installation, which raises a balloon according to the activity of a [...]

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Blinken Button as a SPI Display

25 January 2011 Tinkering
Blinken Button with SPI breakout

There is nothing better than happy and even creative customers! At 27C3 Johannes and Gabe were one of the first customers for the Blinken Button Kit. After some minor issues they managed to assemble their kit. But that was positively not enough for them.  They wanted to use the Blinken Button as SPI slave, so [...]

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Blinken Button revisited

17 January 2011 Projects
The official Blinken Button Marketing Material

It was a bit quiet in the last months here at Interactive Matter. For a reason! One happy day in fall 2010 Mitch and Jeff convinced me to prepare some Blinken Buttons for Beginners Kits for a SMT soldering workshops at the 27c3 in Berlin. I was happy that they did! And I suffered massively [...]

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Twitballoon – a Twitter Trend Visualizer

13 September 2010 Internet of Things
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Interactive Matter proudly presents the first joint project with Tinkerlog (the Space Invaders Button does not count, it was me doing a knock-off): The Twitballon. The nice people of Good School approached us, asking for a simple showcase what tinkering is all about. Nothing less. So Alex of Tinkerlog and Interactive Matter came up with [...]

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aJson – Handle JSON with Arduino

14 August 2010 Internet of Things
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Update: There has bee a major API change in Version 1.0 refer to the dedicated aJson page. Exchanging data with other computers can be a daunting task with Arduino. No matter if you just want to pass some information to Processing, to a Web Service or something else – You always have to encode the [...]

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Palo Altonale – Learn Tinkering at the Good School

27 July 2010 Tinkering
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A short German sumary, English version after the click: Auf zur Palo Altonale! Zusammen mit Tinkerlog, Palo Altona und Interactive Matter bietet die Good School einen Kurs zu Physical Computing & Tinkering in Hamburg an. Ziel des Workshop ist es Kreativen in 2 Tagen die Umsetzung von interaktiven Physical-Computing-Projekten auf Basis von Arduino zu vermitteln.Wer [...]

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Developing Software for the Atmel AVR with AVR-Eclipse

22 July 2010 Tinkering
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Developing software – or better firmware – for the Atmel AVR can be quite easy or quite complicated. A lot of people like to just use vi, some source files and a make file. Here at Interactive Matter we are a tad lazy and want a fully fledged IDE, with code completion, one click building, [...]

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Blinken Buttons for Beginners – a SMT Beginners Kit

8 May 2010 Projects
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You all know the Blinken Button Kit (aka Space Invaders Button). One of the biggest flaws of this kit is that it is not really a beginners kit. But with the help of Jeff (really big thanks for that) I was able to convert it to a perfect SMT beginners kit. The design was drastically [...]

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Palo Altona will build Hamburg’s first Makerbot

9 April 2010 Tinkering
MaerBot Cupcake CNC by Bre Petis

Palo Altona is happy to announce that we will build the first MakerBot Cupcake CNC in Hamburg (at least according to Google). Good School approached Alex of Tinkerlog, me and Palo Altona in general, if we want to help to build their MakerBot. And yes we are happy to help. The weekend project will be [...]

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SkatePOV

5 April 2010 Projects
SkatePOV @ night

SkatePOV brings POV to your skate board. It is a minified version of MiniPOV2 attachable to your skateboard. Draw texts while skating! The LEDs pulse to write the text. By moving the skateboard (aka skating) the blinking is converted into a matrix and the blinking becomes the text. This is the first project in a [...]

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BMP085 Barometric Pressure Sensor Breakout Boards arrived!

17 February 2010 Shop
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You may know that I played around a bit with the BMP085 barometric pressure sensor. Now I am proud to announce that the BMP085 barometric pressure sensor is available as breakout board in the Interactive Matter Shop. The BMP085 Breakout Board is a limited offer. I just got some at hand and supplies last as [...]

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Blinken Button – The LED Matrix Button Kit

7 February 2010 Shop
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Interactive Matter proudly present the first Interactive Matter SMT Kit The Blinken Button! The Blinken Button is a kit for a 8×8 LED Matrix button (the jacket one). It is based on the Space Invaders Button you may already know. The original Blinken Button Kit has been discontinued – check the Blinken Button for Beginners [...]

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Palo Altona – Hamburg Tinker Drinkup

14 January 2010 Tinkering
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Die deutsche Version gibt es nach dem Klick (und dann weiter unten). This time it is all non-technical (technically not – but that starts to get complicated). To further encourage tinkering in Hamburg, Alex and I have established a regularly tinker drinkup every Thursday (nearly) at Saal II. Currently it is a very cosy drinkup, [...]

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