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February site improvements

2014-02-15 Dan

They say that 80% of your success comes from 20% of your time. Find that 20% and do more of that. I couldn’t agree more – some of the best use of my time is when people give me a golden nugget of a suggestion and I use it to improve what I’m doing and how I interact with you. Thank you for your great feedback. Keep it coming!

Do I digress? Perhaps I do. The coffee is kicking in.

You should start to see human-readable URLs show up in the store now, too. Thank you to all those kind SEO spambots that needed to let me know. You have been heard. You can help someone else now.

The store now has back in stock notifications. Want something we don’t carry much of any more? Now it’s even easier to let me know.

Heh. Have I been making it hard to leave feedback about how hard it is to leave feedback? Gah! Irony.

A great big shout out to CEON for their great ZenCart plugins that made these changes possible. I’ve been programming for 20 years and I’ve rarely seen such well documented, easy to use code. Nicely done!

Also I’m running a small survey over on reddit. The question is: would you rather get all the parts for a kit, or just the instructions and the parts and get the rest yourself? Let me know where you stand.

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2014 ISO safety standard for personal care robots

2014-02-08 Dan

Are you looking to build a robot to take care of another human being? The official safety guide is out now. The abstract says,

“ISO 13482:2014 specifies requirements and guidelines for the inherently safe design, protective measures, and information for use of personal care robots, in particular the following three types of personal care robots: mobile servant robot; physical assistant robot; [and] person carrier robot.”

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Come out and meet me in 2014

2014-02-08 Dan

The cardboard throne

Asides from all the usual work of shipping kits and helping people I’ve been hard at working growing my laser cutting business with an instangram project called #28daysoflaser. Every day I post something new I make with my laser cutter. Follow along and share with your friends, please.

I’m also preparing for 6 different public events this year:

Come on out and say hi! I love meeting new people and I’d love to pick your brain about making this site more useful to you.

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New Product Category: Sensors & Buttons!

2014-02-08 Dan

Sensors & Buttons is starting off with a Single Pole, Double Throw switch and 3 pack of hall effect sensors with magnets. I’m looking forward to getting more photovoltaic sensors in stock so I can finally make a maze-solving robot.

So according to the mind map we’ve got a starting point for brain, muscle, nerve, and skeletal hardware. A goal for the near future is to add datasheets and tutorials for each item we stock, and then flesh out the rest of the map.

We’re also placing orders for belts and pulleys. One or two more parts and we’ll have everything you need to build a 3D printer. Should I get those parts in? Are you interested? What other parts would you like to see?