A couple years ago I met a college student who was creating an autonomous Unmanned Ariel Vehicle. The little plane would fly over a field and scan the ground using color sensors. Black lines drawn in the field told the plane not to fly past them, grey lines were landing strips, and so on. He told me not to waste my time with software, and that hardware was the future of innovation. He explained that soon our computers would have "hardware updates" instead of software updates where the compute... Read Full Story

I finally managed to get the UV LED Flashlight kit up on the BW Science Labs Store website. I've already talked about this kit, so I won't overdo promotion. However, it really is nice to see more products being added to the Store. Read Full Story

Yesterday I was rushed to say the least, so I didn't manage to get out a Sunday Status, however today I do have a Monday Status.GlobalI order my electronics components from all over, but one place in particular that I could not be without is Sparkfun. Also, having met some of the Sparkfun employees at the Maker Fair '09 its nice ordering from a small, friendly company with a face. Unfortunately, starting early this week, Sparkfun is being sued by SPARC International, a large company owned by ... Read Full Story

It really pays to read tech news. Today, I stumbled upon an article that claimed that Unity 3D, the powerful 3D game engine, was free at last. I thought it was too good to be true, so I investigated further.For those of you who don't know, Unity 3D is a really powerful enviornment that allows developers to create interactive 3D content. It can be embedded in a web page like Flash, or made as a download for Mac or PC.Unity 3D originally has been $199 for the Indie (independent developer, kind ... Read Full Story

A few months ago I bought a 08 pin picaxe protoboard from Sparkfun. I soldered all the components in place and hooked it up to my PC to program. And of course, I got an error, because it would just be too easy if things worked the first time, wouldn't it? I spent a good long while resoldering all the leads and switching the chip out with other microcontrollers I had on hand to make sure it wasn't the chip's fault.I recently bought a second protoboard to retry what I had previously failed. I s... Read Full Story

Many LEDs and resistors selflessly gave their lives in the development of the BW Science Labs Store's newest kit, the Dual Power UV LED Flashlight kit. Their sacrifice has not been in vain...While developing this kit I uncovered my true love for Ultra-violet LEDs. There just plain awesome! You can use them to detect counterfeit money, kill germs (now that's pretty impressive for a LED), authenticate drivers licenses (and passports?), and stun an assailant (*cough* *cough* shine it in their ey... Read Full Story

GlobalAt MAX 2009 Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch shows Flash 10.1 on a bunch of mobile devices.MicroI've spent the weekend working on the next BW Science Labs Store kits, including prototyping a mini UV LED kit and designing a line following robot.I've also been able to work a bit more on my AS3 game, though not much. Apparently, the phrase, "4 day weekend" loosely translates into teacher as "4 times more homework". Read Full Story

I spent most of my day packaging Vivus the Robot kits, which involves unpacking lots of boxes, taking out the microcontroller, plugging them into my PC, and programming them one at a time. However, I did manage to find the time to continue working on BW Science Labs's next kit, a mini UV LED kit that can be used to sterilize your hands (and your prized action figure collection in the basement of your mom's house), detect counterfeit money (now hey, that's pretty darn cool), make your teeth gl... Read Full Story

Here's the thing, I love programming. I love the whole process of writing code and building a functional program by speaking a language the computer will understand. However, I really do not like painstakingly drawing art one little image at a time. On top of that, I have no idea how to generate sound effects for any of my programs. While I still have to brave out the whole art thing, at least I've solved the sound effects issue. A software engineer named Thomas Pettersson created a program c... Read Full Story

I am a proud owner of the Palm Pre. It's slick, fast, and pretty cool. There are only 136 apps in the Pre's app store, compared to the iPhone app store's several thousand (or more), that's not much at all. So, naturally I was inclined to want to write some apps and sell them, hopefully making a nice return. If you don't already know, the iPhone Developer program has you pay a one time fee of $99 and you're free to post up your apps to the iTunes App store, and make a fantastic 70% of profit. ... Read Full Story