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 embeddable Raspberry Pis, musical gloves, an open source Siri alternative and an awesome kickstarter project.

RAM a Pi in to Your Project

This week the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced a new form factor for the Raspberry Pi. It’s the in the form of an embeddable board with standard DDR2 SO-DIMM connector. It has 512 megs of RAM and 4 gigs of flash, so no more SD Cards!

You can buy them initially with the Compute Module and IO board for prototyping and now you can use a tonne more GPIO pins! Awesome.

Just don’t try and put it in to your PC or else it’ll probably destroy the universe or at least your computer’s motherboard along with your new Pi.

Musical Gloves

Musician Imogen Heap wants a more expressive way to perform music. But there was nothing out there that fulfilled her requirements. So for the past 4 years she’s teamed up with other makers and came up with gesture recognizing gloves.

Each gesture can be translated in to music, modifying sounds in all sorts of ways.

She’s currently Kickstarting the project and upon completion she’ll be releasing the gloves software and hardware to the open source community.

Control Everything with Your Voice

Siri betta watch out, there’s a new personal assistant the block, Jasper. And he’s open source, and extendable.

Over on the project page on github it show’s Jasper running on a Raspberry Pi with off the shelf hardware. It goes over the list of hardware you need and how to extend Jasper.

Now beside this being an awesome project, I love the fact that they used a video and their project page is like a product page selling the project to developers. This is a new standard which hopefully more projects will emulate.

Kickstarter of the Week

This week’s awesome kickstarter project is called the MicroView. A tiny Arduino compatible microcontroller with an embedded OLED screen.

For the first time you can see instantly what your Arduino is thinking. This can be used as a powerful tool for teaching electronics. The MicroView has a library for showing gauges, images, graphs and smiley faces!

It can be used for games, robot brains, wearables and much more. When backing make sure you get the MicroView with a programmer for easy plug-and-play flashing.

Outro

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)