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 the biggest open source patent release in history, a NES Keytar, blazing baseball caps and an awesome Kickstarter project.
Tesla’s Patents
On Thursday, Tesla Motors announced that they are open sourcing all electric vehicle patents. This may allow smaller companies to get in to the market but ultimately will help create a common platform.
Whilst the hobbyist maker may not have the means to create an electric vehicle of their own, this kind of move could be the gold standard on how 3D printer manufacturers should behave.
Game of Keytars
Greig, the Theremin Hero, has created a keytar by mashing a NES, guitar hero controller, 3 mini Arduinos, a raspberry pi and some other bits and bobs.
Over on his channel there are renditions of Games of Thrones and Star Trek The Next Generation themes. He’s working on a build video so be sure to subscribe to his YouTube channel.
LED Baseball Hat
This week’s wearable project over on Adafruit is the Sound Reactive LED Baseball Cap. It uses the Adafruit Arduino compatible wearable platform – FLORA.
The project has uses a mic to pick up sound from the environment and the LEDs light up depending on the intensity of the sound. It looks like an awesome project to do. Whoever if you’re looking for a more formal look there’s a similar project using a tie!
Kickstarter of the Week
This week’s awesome Kickstarter project is Lil’Bot.
The Lil’Bot is a self balancing robot that allows you or your kids to learn about robotics and hacking. The bot is Arduino compatible and can be programmed using Blockly, a Scratch like visual programming tool. If this interests you why not back the project now?
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)