I’ve launched another interesting electronic jewelry product, called the Sound Spark, over at the sensebridge.com site. It’s a sound reactive necklace pendant. Basically it flashes lights in time with your voice, a really cool effect to draw attention to yourself! The project was heavily based on the bliplace, basically all I did was convert all parts to surface mount, add a button (connected to an interrupt) so you can put the device in standby without taking out the battery, and of course make it pretty using some epoxy, just like I did with the Heart Spark. Those of you really looking can probably see the jumper wire in the photo to the left, turns out I somehow managed to not wire VCC into the microcontroller! The epoxy is totally awesome for making that kind of thing possible in a protected way: that jumper wire is as secure as the rest of the circuit, and that rules.

I’m also working on a new circuit tentatively called “Mood Spark” which acts kind of like the mood-rings of old, it’s got a temperature sensor and RGB LEDs and will change color as the temperature changes. No idea if it will work very well, but it should be fun to play around with!

UPDATE: I’ve made a tech details page for Sound Spark, you can go download the code, etc. Enjoy!

That’s right, we’ve got a sister site now: sensebridge.com! It’s supposed to be more market friendly, look all sharp and fancy, etc. This site, sensebridge.net, will continue to be as it is – crazy hacker/maker website were we can let it all hang out, talk about the development and the code, etc. The new site launches with a new version of the Heart Spark, there are two minor changes: (1) it’s made with black solder mask for the PCB, improving the looks and (2) there are now three switches on the back, the left-most of which actually turns the device on and off. Radical I know! Taking the battery in-and-out was just much more annoying than I had anticipated, so I think this is a major improvement, even if it’s only a minor change in the schematics. I’ve also committed to launching a new product once every month for sensebridge.com over the fall, although the September product might not quite make the end of the month. I basically want to diversify the line-up of ‘electronic jewelry’ products, so that there are a number of choices on the website, and I could theoretically have a trade-show booth and fill it up with cool stuff!

We love it when customers hack the Heart Spark. It doesn’t happen nearly often enough! Check out this awesome hack by Rain: you make my heart flutter. She modded a Heart Spark to add a second board, on which an infrared range sensor is mounted. When something gets near the Heart Spark, three of the LEDs go red, showing your proximity. It’s a neat effect, and it makes the Heart Spark even more interactive than it was before! She also has some of the best photos of the Heart Spark that I’ve seen anywhere – certainly better than my amateur efforts! Thank you Rain, and keep up the good work!

Heart Spark is going to be featured at Maker Faire! Maker Faire is this weekend, May 21 & 22. The Heart Spark will be in Lynne Bruning’s eTextile Showcase and at the eTextile Lounge. North Paw will also be at the faire, at the Noisebridge booth. You won’t be able to buy either of them at the faire, but as always you can purchase them online right here . I’m super excited for the Maker Faire, hope to see you all there! Our friend Meredith, the Lady Cartoonist, will also be there, showing off her starboards – you might remember her from the North Skirt. Finally, I’ll (Eric Boyd) be giving a talk on the future of sensors at the upcoming Quantified Self Conference, the week after Maker Faire. There are still a few tickets left.

We’re pleased to announce the launch of the new V1.6 North Paw kits! These kits are very similar to the V1.5 kits, except that the enclosure has been changed to a small black plastic box. This change was made mostly because it was very very time consuming to make the laser cut acrylic enclosures, both for us and for our customers; these new enclosures snap together in about 1/10 of a second! Minor improvements have been made in other places: the battery is now physically smaller and more rigid (increasing safety), the velcro dots are now much less likely to go missing during transit, and the confusing R1 on the rear of the PCB has been moved back to the front thanks to a superior, smaller, layout. Get more information on the North Paw page, or read the new instructions.

Alison of iHeartSwitch has hacked a Heart Spark to turn it into a beautiful crystal beaded jacket. Click through to see a video of the beads in action. I especially love the use of pink wire

Announcing at long-last the logging version of Heart Spark! It collects data on every beat of your heart, for up to 14 hours. Then you can go an plot it and make pretty charts & graphs. We have a very limited number of Heart Spark Logging beta units available. Beta means this is not the final product, changes are still taking place in the code, bugs are being fixed. But it’s not alpha: all major features are present and the software is totally usable. If you’ve been waiting for a truly open heart rate monitor, your wait is over.

We sure are excited to hear from a bunch of new people after this Wired article.

But, it did hit us a bit by surprise; we had yet to update our North Paw inventory numbers as we were right in the middle of getting more kits together. But fear not! More kits are ready now, so order yours here.

I’ve made the product page for Heart Spark, our new blinking pendant! I have only a small number available at the moment, but more are being assembled rapidly. There is a lot of labor per pendant – by the time you count all the soldering, programming, testing, epoxying and packaging, it’s over an hour per pendant! But I think the final result is super stunning, I’ve been getting a lot of comments when I wear mine around. And I’m a man! On a lady it should be spectacular! Anyway, check it out and let me know what you think. The logging version should follow in about a month, once I get the software side working a little bit better.

I was interviewed for The Mark News, a local (Toronto) outfit. They came by the hacklab.to and I talked about North Paw and the Heart Spark:

Heart Spark is almost ready to go on sale. I have received the first lot of boards from China, assembled and tested the first one (works!), so sometime this week you can expect to see a limited number for sale here. Currently I am assembling them myself, it takes about 30 minutes of delicate surface mount soldering per board, plus extra time for programming, testing and the all important attachment of the jewelry bits, of course .