News

Our friends over at Seeed Studio have announced plans to release the long-awaited DSO Touch mid-range entry in the DSO portable digital oscilloscope family. More importantly they're seeking feedback on its design, and are willing to put their money where their mouth is with two pre-production samples being made available to testers. Designed to sit between the ultra-portable DSO Nano and the high-end DSO Quad, the DSO Touch is a surprisingly capable digital storage oscilloscope powered by an open hardware ARM platform and open source software stack. It's unlikely to replace a Rigol or HP in anyone's workshop, but as...

The Arduino team has unveiled a first glimpse of the upcoming integrated development environment (IDE) update that will add support for the Arduino TRE Linux-based development board. Designed in conjunction with the BeagleBoard.org team, the Arduino TRE combines the microcontroller-based real-time control capabilities of the Arduino Uno with a powerful 1GHz Sitara microprocessor which runs a specialised version of the GNU/Linux operating system. In short: it aims to be the best of both the microcontroller and the microcomputer worlds in a single, Arduino-compatible design. New hardware needs new software, and a group of 100 beta testers are currently trying out...

The week we've been waiting for has finally arrived: the Wuthering Bytes festival in Hebden Bridge, the temporary centre of the UK Maker Belt, begins on Friday. We've already waxed lyrical about the exciting talks on Friday and the OSHCamp presentations on Saturday, but there's another reason to be popping along to sunny Yorkshire this weekend: hands-on workshops on the Sunday. Designed to appeal to everyone from beginners to specialists, the workshops are many and varied. From building a Phenoptix MeArm with its inventor Ben Gray to making your own cut-price Arduino-compatible PCB Shrimp with Matt Venn, Simon Cook's hands-on...

Hackspaces, volunteer-driven meeting rooms and workshops for makers and tinkerers, are fascinating places. We're always eager to see what our friends around the globe are doing, and Ronald Huveneers of the NYC Resistor hackspace has caught our eye with a particularly ambitious project: reverse-engineering the facility's somewhat buggy pick-and-place machine with a view to fixing its limitations and adding new features. For those not familiar with industrial equipment, a pick-and-place machine does exactly what its name suggests: it picks up components and places them, usually putting small surface-mount devices (SMDs) into very precise positions on a printed circuit board. They're...

When a company called Bread Board Maniac sets up shop, it catches our interest; when one of its first products is a solderless breadboard made from wood, it gets our attention. As a result, we've been spending the last short while looking longingly at the company's webshop and wondering if we can justify augmenting our warehouse toolkits with a few wooden accessories, such as the aforementioned but sadly prohibitively expensive fir wood breadboard, a wooden Arduino Pro Mini case, or even the cute wooden micro-USB power connector. The team's soon-to-finish Kickstarter campaign for a LEGO-compatible semi-permanent prototyping board dubbed the...