Author Archive

Sensebridge Shutdown

June 28, 2019mrericboyd No Comments »

As you might have guessed by the long period with no posting, Sensebridge is out of business. We’ve been out of stock on Northpaw Kits since late 2016; we do not have plans to make more kits. If you’re interested in making your own from scratch, most of the info you need to do so […]

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North Paw Calibration Video

May 9, 2014mrericboyd No Comments »

We’ve been selling a lot of pre-assembled North Paws over the last few months, and we’ve had several people write in with issues about distorted directions. Turns out these people either hadn’t calibrated, or couldn’t figure out how to get calibration to work – and I agree, understanding it from our written description (second last […]

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Heart Spark V2.0!

June 17, 2013mrericboyd No Comments »

I’ve finally managed to make more Heart Spark V2.0s! It’s been a lot more trouble than I anticipated – basically, I had some beginners luck with soldering the 0.4mm pitch pins on the ATTINY24, and once that luck ended, it took me a long time to get it working again. New paste, some layout changes, […]

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North Paw available at Think Geek!

April 7, 2013mrericboyd 1 Comment »

The North Paw is now available at Think Geek!. I’m super impressed with the quality of their marketing – the illustration to the right very quickly conveys how the device works, much better than a verbal description is capable of doing. I’ve found lots of people think, even after a good description of how it […]

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North Paw Bug Fix

February 4, 2013mrericboyd No Comments »

We’ve recently discovered a small problem with the compass modules included in the most recent lot of North Paw kits. For some reason, in the default sensitivity setting (1.3 gauss), about 1/3 of the time now, the x axis will overflow, and report -4095 instead of whatever the reading should be. This shouldn’t happen, since […]

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North Paw Preassembled!

November 23, 2012mrericboyd 1 Comment »

For quite a while we’ve been offering an assembly service, where for $70 we will custom assemble a North Paw after you order it. This service has been somewhat popular, accounting for perhaps 10% of North Paw sales in total. As of today, we’re switching to instead offering pre-assembled North Paws, made in batches, which […]

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Heart Spark V2.0

August 2, 2012mrericboyd 1 Comment »

The new version of Heart Spark is finally available! The new Heart Spark has a whole series of design changes: New rectangular shape, since so many people complained about the Heart shape 16 HUGE LEDs in a line New microcontroller (attiny24) saves a lot of power, increasing battery life to at least 50 hours! Three […]

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North Paw V2.0!

May 9, 2012mrericboyd No Comments »

Announcing the next version of North Paw, North Paw V2.0! The new version looks identical externally to the V1.6 North Paw that we’ve been selling for about a year, and internally it’s much the same as well. The only difference is the compass module itself. The HM55B 2-axis compass module that we used to use […]

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Sensebridge in Make Magazine

February 17, 2012mrericboyd No Comments »

Make Volume 29 features an interview with me, Eric Boyd, about the North Paw and sensebridge. We were also featured on Make: Live on January 11th. The YouTube video is a playlist with 9 parts, they talk about Heart Spark at the 3:45 mark in Part 7. Discussion of North Paw starts at 5:15 in […]

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Sound Spark

December 3, 2011mrericboyd 1 Comment »

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 […]

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