Member Since: October 8, 2010

Country: United States


Programming Languages

Objective-C, C++, C, others as necessary

  • Maybe I'm not understanding the intent of the energy points model, but a subscription-like service seems so antithetical to the point of making your own things that I'm having a hard time even reading more about it. It feels like buying (okay, licensing) a word processor only to find that you also need to pay for each document you want to create, and also for extra features like spell check. Looks like a nice board with a good mix of features, but unless I can use the board with my own software instead of the Blynk app, I'll pass.

  • If you add a MIDI-OUT, MIDI-IN seems like an obvious next step. There's plenty of room for two octaves' worth of servos.

  • The trouble with "required to use specific Pantone color numbers" is that it doesn't provide any useful protection for the trademark holder. A competitor could (would, surely) build a meter that looks exactly like a Fluke, but in court they'd claim "Oh, no, we were very careful not to infringe not their mark. See? When you hold our meter next to theirs, our yellow is clearly a little different. They specified Pantone 109, so we were very careful not to use that color. We used Pantone 110 instead."

    Turn the situation around. What if I started selling electronic components and tools over the web. I'm sure nobody at SparkFun would mind -- they seem very open to friendly competition. But then I start shipping my products in red boxes with white lettering -- not SparkFun red, mind you, but some other shade of bright red. And, lets imagine that my products were of relatively low quality compared to SparkFun's, and that my prices were also much lower than theirs. Would SparkFun do something about it? Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't, but they'd at least have legitimate cause to feel pretty cheesed off about the situation. And their lawyer might tell them that whether they liked it or not, they really had to take action.

  • Wait -- SparkFun has a Maryland branch?!

    From the video, looks like it's maybe just someone working remotely, but I'd love to know otherwise.

  • FWIW, winter storms don't get official names sanctioned by the National Weather Service. They only get hyped up unofficial nicknames designed to heighten drama and sell more ads on The Weather Channel and send everyone running to stock up on milk, bread, and TP. What used to be "flurries with a chance of small accumulation" is now "Winter Storm System Dracula." Sheesh. (http://gizmodo.com/5958466/the-national-weather-service-refuses-to-acknowledge-dumb-winter-storm-names)

    Now back to your regularly scheduled geekery.




  • Really nice work. I don't mean to be a wet blanket, but after working so hard on the thing it'd seem a good idea to use your own keyboard image rather than lifting one from iOS. I realize it's just a placeholder, but now that photos are public it should be replaced.

  • Sparkfun's design team reviews flight suit concepts for a future Scaled Composites vehicle.

No public wish lists :(