Intro

Hello World, and welcome to That Maker Show with me, chalkers, your host to all things new in the maker movement.

This week we’re talking about a software giant getting into 3D printing hardware, the Arduino Zero, NFC manicures and an awesome kickstarter project.

Autodesk’s 3D Printer

The leading 3D modelling software-maker, Autodesk, is going into hardware. They’re releasing their own stereolithographic 3D printer.

Autodesk wants drive the adoption of its new Spark software. Autodesk wants Spark to be used by 3D-printer manufacturer startups, in the same way Android has been used for smartphone manufacturers. Other manufacturers can use Spark to power their 3D printers while experimenting with the design and polymers.

Arduino Zero

Arduino have officially announced the Arduino Zero. A 32-bit big brother to the 8-bit Arduino Uno.

All digital pins (except the transmit and receive pins) are now PWM. The Analog pins now offer 12-bits of resolution opposed to the 10-bits on the UNO. It also sports an embedded debugger so no additional hardware is needed. Details on pricing and availability are sparse but for more technical details check out the Arduino site.

NFC Manicure

Becky Stern over on the Adafruit YouTube channel shows a couple of experiments with NFC. She embeds them in novel places so it’s easy to unlock your Android smartphone.

She shows a couple of examples of embedding NFC tags into rings but the most fascinating example is painting an NFC tag on to your thumb nail with nail polish. Funky!

Kickstarter of the Week

This week’s awesome Kickstarter project is an ISP shield.

ISP or In System Programming is a way to shrink your projects down. If you don’t want to embed your full Arduino in your projects and want to program the Atmel chips to embed them instead, this shield is for you. It’s compatible with Arduino Uno and Leonardo and their compatible clones.

Outro

Once again, thanks for watching, remember to subscribe for your weekly dose of maker news.

Notable mentions

Hit me up @chalkers on twitter if you have any stories you’d like me to cover. If they don’t make it into the show I’ll include them as notable mentions in the show notes.

Hosted and Written by: Andrew Chalkley (@chalkers)
Produced by: Michael Poley (@michaelpoley)