MindKits News and Blog

The world of Arduino has exploded into a huge variety of awesome hardware, libraries of code and dedicated people sharing projects and inspiration. With an avalanche of options, information and projects vying for your attention means you’re going to miss things so we’ve put together the top five list of the most often missed Arduino project starters that you need to know about.  Read More...

OMG Ponies!!!!
Our new range of Funduino 100% Arduino Compatible's are X-Treme! Well, they're extremely awesome because they're functionally the same as the Arduino branded gear but far less expensive.

Low cost 100% Compatible Arduino Clone for $25.99

"What's the quickest, best and most cost effective way to learn Arduino?" is a question I've been asked a lot lately so I went on a hunt to find the best resources for you and your buddies to learn Arduino quickly - I had the extra challenge of doing it as cost effectively as possible and I'm emailing to share that I think I've found a diamond in the rough that I think you should know about. Read More...

One of our Mindkits' customers is doing a presentation in Christchurch on 5:30pm Tuesday 26th March at the EPIC Centre. It's a presentation that's rapidly becoming famous and was incredibly well received - definitely not one to miss.

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After a number of years in stasis I've resurrected the MindKits forums. It's a great place to ask questions, find support and share anything robotics/electronics/geek life related. Read More...

Here's a really nice simple project pulling together Arduino for interaction with the physical world and C# for the software world. MindKits customer 'Gareth' used this as a learning tool and built a way to rate tunes through iTunes with two buttons on a breadboard to increase and decrease the rating. 

Check out the code and pics below.

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Marty McFly’s hoverboard is not quite here, but this Electric Scooter is just as good. The technological advancement of lightweight batteries and efficient electric motors provide a mode of transport that we only could wish about while watching Back to the Future.
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2-year-old Emma wanted to play with blocks, but a condition called arthrogryposis meant she couldn’t move her arms. So researchers at a Delaware hospital 3D printed a durable custom device with the tiny, lightweight custom parts she needed. Emma calls them her “magic arms.”  Read More...

Written by Guest Blogger: Keith Colson - Robo Comp Co-Organiser
Saturday August the 4th 2012 saw the second ever Robonz Table top robotics competition see www.robonz.com for details. MindKits were kind enough to sponsor it again and we loved having them with us to help the spirit of competition. Read on to see the videos of the robots and the competitions; they're well worth checking out.  Read More...

While 3D printing might be all the tech geek rage right now, the cooler story is what some people are doing with it to make an actual difference. We’ve seen stories of medical uses such as new 3D-printed limbs and that’s incredible but USC professor Behrokh Khoshnevis has just blown my mind. He wants to print houses...and he's making a lot of sense.
Imagine 3D printing on such a large scale, using a concrete-style material, that could “print” a house in as little as 20 hours.  Read More...

Guest Blog Post by the creator of the absolutely amazing Simduino - Derek Knight
I read about Arduino about 6 months ago. My brother had mentioned Raspberry Pi to me and while looking at what this was about I discovered Arduino. The idea of having a small computer that could do simple tasks was very appealing. It also took me back about 45 years when I used to have something called a Philips Electronic Engineering kit. Again you'd connect various components together and make a circuit that did cool things. Back then cool meant a flashing light or a radio (which my dad and I built and which I remember did actually work). I had often thought how cool it would be if I was able to design a simple electronic circuit on an iPad and then make a "light" blink on and off on the iPad. So just before Christmas I thought more seriously and Simduino was the result.

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Mindhive is a tech collective built around offering custom industrial tech to NZ and international SMEs...but now they're opening up the space up as a maker space, hacker space, meeting place and creative space...and it's awesome!
I met with Dion from Mindhive and he was kind enough to write a post for us. Keep reading for more.

We now have a space down in Britomart that is open to tech creatives wanting to get out of their parents basement (for want of a better expression). The space space normally houses our dynamic projects team so its not always full is dominated by a 30ft inflatable brain cell, has power, high speed net, a shed load of stairs (its on the top floor) and an open door policy to nerdy creatives.  Read More...

All the Arduino tinkers out there!
Have you wanted to know how much energy that popcorn machine has
or that incandescent light bulb over you desk, maybe even that heater
at your feet! Well this neat non-invasive sensor circuit is for you!  Read More...

Did you know you support the community every time you give your order to MindKits? We've always been about fostering community and supporting it. Everyone who orders from MindKits helps support other makers and tinkerers because a portion of their purchase goes back into the community and the projects we run to support it. You help others by being kind enough to give us your business. So, I thought I'd write this so you can see where it all goes. Read More...

It's 3:30 in the afternoon at my former and very last employers office. I'm staring at my toes under my desk. More exactly I'm wondering how my work shoes can simultaneously be so uncomfortable, so expensive and leave my feet so cold. They symbolised everything I felt at that moment about working in a corporate and I just wanted to work when I wanted to work, see my partner Fay, then take my shoes off and do what I love - solving the worlds problems, talking and laughing together. Not being stuck in an office...anything but being stuck in an office on someone else's time schedule which meant I had to stay there when, because of my penchant for efficiency, I had completed more than my days tasks and prepared the following days activities by 3pm.  In that moment, my cold uncomfortable restraining conforming business shoes and their metaphor for how I was feeling were my total attention. 
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With home security getting more on demand, we can tinker with Arduino and get alerted when events are triggered and even get a photo of who was there! With a few cimple components and a little soldering knowledge, this project looks at the Arduino with an Ethernet Shied to send a message to an online service that forwards that to your mobile!  Read More...

Intro by Tim from MindKits:
On Saturday 28th of April 2012 MindKits was lucky enough to help support the growing community of robotics enthusiasts and their first competition which was help at NextWindow in Auckland.

Gary T was key in instigating the competition with the aim of  getting people motivated and build robots, for fun and foster innovation. And man, what a lot of fun it was. Gary was kind enough to write a guest blog post for us on the events of the day. Read on for more...

While trying to get such a thing to happen in Auckland on a regular basis, ie 3 - 4 months, the first was small with a single objective, well 5 objectives.  To remove 5 empty drink cans from a 1.2m diameter table as quickly as possible.
 
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It's one of those moments that makes us all sigh and feel a little disappointed. A great company grows and as it grows its pricing and margins go up instead of what we were all told in school about supply and demand causing pricing to come down. Their once great supplies become expensive, we buy less of them and we long for the old days when that company was on 'our side'.  Read More...

After making an awesome Arduino project, you might want to finalize it so you can reuse that Arduino for future creativity.  Here is a link from one of the Tutorials in Mindkits.  This Tutorial can be more than building your own Arduino, there are other great educational links if you are just starting.  It's a way to understand more on Arduino at the same time!

(Click at the bottom for more Info)
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