Eric Boyd and his Haptic Compass Anklet. It’s actually a really good video, Loren even edited in a couple slides & photos (that were not there that evening), to give some extra context, great job Loren!
Eric Boyd – The North Paw: A Haptic Compass Anklet from Loren Risker on Vimeo.
My friend Meredith Scheff pulled off an awesome hack in time for Maker Faire this year: the North Skirt. It uses a North Paw V1.5 kit, plus her soft-circuit StarBoards (kits coming soon!, kits available now!), to make a skirt with LEDs that light up on the north side of the wearer only. Much spinning and twirling ensued! She showed off the skirt in the Fashioning Technology fashion show at Maker Faire. It was also featured in the Anti/Surveillance fashion show (also at Maker Faire) put on by noisebridge the next day.
Announcing the next generation of North Paw! It’s taken a lot longer than we anticipated, but the new improved kits are finally ready. Improvements include:
I presented the new North Paw at Quantified Self last night and got a very positive response, people love it!
I’ll be giving a talk titled “wearable electronic senses” at BIL, an unconference-style event held near the famous (and expensive) TED conference. Both are in Long Beach, California. If you’re nearby, drop on in! My talk will be only 20 minutes long (see schedule), but I’m planning to hold a fun demo/Q&A session as well in the Open Culture space.
Inspiration strikes! Skory and I talked months ago about how the big black electronic enclosure box could be replaced with a couple of sheets of super cool acrylic. Now, I’ve done it! It only took about an hour, once I had the 1/8″ thick acrylic in hand. Trace the black box twice, cut with hack saw, drill 4 holes with 5/32 drill bit, use 2 8-32 screws with nuts. Presto chango, awesome North Paw mod! As an extra bonus, the thickness of this new enclosure is reduced to 11/16″, from the 1″ dimension of the JM22 enclosure.
I went on the noisebridge China Trip, with Mitch Altman, creator of the TV-B-Gone, a remote control with only one button. He invited noisebridge members (and any other hackers interested) to join him on a tour of some factories near Shanghai, and I was excited enough about that to buy tickets to China. We toured factories that did surface mount PCB assembly (super fast robots!), plastic injection molding, printing at industrial scale and speed, keyboard assembly (way more labor intensive than I imagined), and miner lamp assembly. I got to see all kinds of interesting things and make several business contacts. Sensebridge will be working with some of those contacts to have the North Paw made in China – an exciting project! It’ll be many months before that effort shows up as products on this website, of course, but we’re excited to be moving forward on the China dream that we’ve had for a long time.
Finally, all the pieces are in place and we have new kits! So, if you’ve been waiting, wait no longer. Order now and we’ll have your kit in the mail within 2-3 days.
Noisebridge, the hackerspace that got us going on this cyborg stuff, had an open house on Friday night, celebrating one year hacking activity, and the new 5600 sq-ft of space. The cyborg group had a small display of our various projects, including the North Paw compass anklet, the ultrasonic echolocation project, and the pulse choker. I talked to a ton of people about these projects, and I got several very valuable ideas for how to make the projects better. I also got several people interested in coming to our Sunday cyborg meetings, and a couple of people said they would come buy North Paw kits at a future meeting. There were at least a hundred people in the space, and it still didn’t feel like we were sardines, the new space is awesome!
I’ve never gotten a call about a typhoon before. But then just this afternoon a real human from the shipping company TNT called me to say that our shipment of pager motors would be delayed due to the storm. How’s that for good service?
Anyway, if you’ve ordered a kit this week, don’t worry; we still have plenty of motors and your shipping time will be entirely typhoon-independent. I promise.
Ordering a North Paw just got a lot easier! We’ve upgraded to a Paypal business account, and that was the magic needed to start using their shopping carts feature.
When we have more new senses to offer you, it will probably make sense to build our own in-site shopping cart. But with only one product, Paypal’s shopping carts are just fine. Hey, you don’t even need a Paypal account to use it. So if you’ve been waiting to make an order, now’s the time! Head to our orders page and give that Add to Cart button a whirl.