Hey Indiana-area makers out there, there are 2 important upcoming deadlines you should know about.

Maker Faire Indy is taking place September 17th and 18th at the Conner Prairie Interactive History Park. It looks to be a great time for ladies, gentlemen, and kids of all ages. Via their website:

Indy Mini Maker Faire features hands-on making, building and repurposing, culinary crafting, garage technology, historic technology, arts and creativity, robots, and more! If you like building, crafting, creating, or just seeing clever or weird stuff that other people have made, Indy Mini Maker Faire is for you.

The Indy Mini Maker Faire joins with Conner Prairie’s Country Fair so there’ll be historic machines and making from back in the day when Hoosiers made their clothes, grew their food, and built or fixed everything they had.

In addition to Maker Faire Indy, a second Indiana Maker Faire will be taking place just 2 weeks later. The Fort Wayne Regional Maker Faire, taking place on October 1st and 2nd at Headwaters Park East, promises to be a great time! From the Maker Faire Fort Wayne event site:

Fort Wayne Regional Maker Faire celebrates things people create themselves — from James Bond-worthy electronic gizmos to Martha Stewart-quality “slow made” foods and homemade clothes. Inspiration is ubiquitous at the festival and there are surprises around every corner for people of all ages.

Both events promise to be alot of fun. If you’re an exhibitor, THE CALL FOR MAKERS DEADLINE FOR BOTH EVENTS IS JUNE 30th (that’s 2 DAYS from now).

Maker Faire Indy application: link
Maker Faire Fort Wayne application: link.

Hurry up and get those submissions in!

Now that’s impressive! Sydney-based maker “The Mechatronics Guy” (sorry, I couldn’t find your actual name on the site, let me know what it is if you want) aka Gavin Smith built this extremely impressive device called “The LightScythe”. The LightScythe is a large, 2m POV display based on an Arduino board. The display is capable of receiving images sent by a laptop over a wireless Zigbee link. Software and hardware details, and much more, can be found at the LightScythe project page.

(via Make)

Another day, another new product. Announcing the NBitWonder T-shirt!

Shirts are black with the NBitWonder logo emblazoned across the chest. Adult small, medium, and large sizes are available, and shirts are 100% cotton.

Proceeds from the sale of this product go to NBitWonder and its employees, helping us develop new software, tools, and tutorials for electronic hobbyists everywhere, as well as exciting new projects.

Show your support for NBitWonder and purchase your NBitWonder T-shirt here.

Announcing our very first NBitWonder product, the Seal of Omega Medallion!

In the Doctor Who Universe, Omega is an engineer and one of the founders of the oldest time-traveling race, the timelords. He created a device, the Hand of Omega, capable of influencing stellar interactions within a star. With it, he turned a star into a black hole, creating the first power source for the timelord time machines.

A few weeks back, I etched a series of printed circuit board art medallions based on symbols from the British sci-fi series Doctor Who. They received an overwhelmingly positive response. People wanted to buy them, so I’m offering a few pieces for sale to help support NBitWonder.

The seals are etched copper-clad circuit board, with the image etched on one side. The seal measures 3.25″ in diameter, and includes a small tab at the top for use as a medallion (the tab can be cut off with scissors). The artwork used in this product is a fan-based design. Permission for commercial use has been granted by the original artist, and no copyright infringement is involved in this piece.

Proceeds from the sale of this product go to NBitWonder and its employees, helping us develop new software, tools, and tutorials for electronic hobbyists everywhere, as well as exciting new projects.

Show your support for Doctor Who and NBitWonder and purchase your Seal of Omega Medallion here.

NBitWonder Etsy web store: link

Maker Faire North Carolina was a blast! We had a great turn out there, and met many many awesome people.

One of the biggest questions we got from visitors to our table was “Where I can buy this?”. To all those looking for our products, I can simply say, we’re listening, and working as quickly as possible to make everything we make available to you.

While we work towards setting up a dedicated NBitWonder shop here at NBitWonder.com, we have set up a temporary NBitWonder store over at Etsy. A link has been added to the site navigation bar for our store (the Etsy one and later the NBitWonder one when that is finished).

We hope you take the time to visit the NBitWonder shop, and if you like our stuff, consider buying something and supporting the work we do financially. All proceeds from Etsy sales go towards NBitWonder and it’s employees, allowing us to make more, better software, tools, and tutorials for electronics hobbyists as well as new, awesome projects.

Need something fun to do this weekend? The American Radio Relay League (ARRL) is hosting their annual field day this weekend on Saturday June 25th and Sunday June 26th. The objective of field day, as borrowed from the ARRL Website is:

To work as many stations as possible on any and all amateur bands (excluding the 60, 30, 17, and 12-meter bands) and to learn to operate in abnormal situations in less than optimal conditions. Field Day is open to all amateurs in the areas covered by the ARRL/RAC Field Organizations and countries within IARU Region 2. DX stations residing in other regions may be contacted for credit, but are not eligible to submit entries.

Should be a great time! For radio operators in the West Lafayette, Indiana and Roanoke, Virginia areas, you may even catch Ben (KB9WWL) or I (KD8LRB) on the airwaves. So man your radios and have a fun weekend!

Maker Faire NC was a blast! We met many interesting people there and had an all-around good time. One of the more interesting people we met at the faire was Victor Aprea of WickedDevice.

The DayCounter kit from WickedDevice

WickedDevice is an electronics kit business. They have several interesting products, including low power sensor kit, Altoids tin clock, and DayCounter kit. In addition, they have a fairly active blog with good electronics posts (as well as plenty of other miscellaneous posts). Check em out!

Here at NBitWonder we make a point of trying not to blog excessively (why parrot content when you can generate it?), but when I saw this LED Wind indicator by Instructables user janw I couldn’t resist a post.

From his instructable:

I have something with the weather. I always like to know how warm or cold it is, how much rain has fallen, how hard the wind blows and from what direction,… and so there are lots of sensors around our house to keep me up to date. These sensors give only a limited range of data, so I still need the internet to inform me about everything I want to know.

I am lucky because one of the national weather data collecting points is located in the village where I live. And all its data is to be found on the internet, together with the data of all other collecting points and predictions for the upcoming days in a very handy XML-file.

The only drawback is that you always need a computer to access that data. So I decided to start building a device to display the data without a pc. This wind indicator is a test version, displaying only the wind direction, its force and a prediction for the next day. It is connected to a pc via a USB to RS232 converter, but the future project should be able to work as a stand alone version.

That board looks beautiful! Source code and additional details for the project are available at the link above, so go check it out!

Maker Faire North Carolina was a blast! We had a great turnout and sincerely want to thank everyone who showed up and participated and made the event possible. Below are some photos from Maker Faire North Carolina:

For even more photos of Maker Faire North Carolina, check out the NBitWonder photostream and Maker Faire North Carolina flickr pool.

Sam Mussmann (left)

Big news for the summer, our very own Sam Mussmann has graduated from Purdue University with his bachelor’s degree in computer engineering. Sam has been very helpful setting up the website here at NBitWonder and providing support and insight to help get everything working together.

For the future, Sam is attending the University of Illinois, where he will be pursuing his master’s degree in computer sciente. Myself and the rest of the NBitWonder staff wish Sam the best of luck for the future and congratulate him on his victorious summer!