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An epic thread on “What’s your definition of ‘open source hardware’?”. It’s all new, no one knows – this is one the most fun and exciting times of a community.

Just some background, Josh is behind the very cool Stribe project and we’ve posted about it before (and again right before Maker Faire since it was there). When it was posted up we said “open source” project, but since some folks consider “open source” as something you can sell I added an update that said, it’s actually non-commercial since that’s what the Maker (Josh) wanted, no commercial versions… Well, this sparked off a very, spirited, discussion about what “open source” is. So check out the thread and comment there (or here) with your thoughts. It’s all very new and it seems like a lot of hardware is now released under Creative Commons, folks are calling things open source hardware, open hardware or just not calling it anything… and some are releasing all but one part of a project. I think we’re going to all end up calling things “Open Hardware” and then have some indicator of the usage… This is an “Open Hardware Project” with a “Non-commercial manufacturing license”. Dive in!

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THE NEW MILLENNIUM PAPER AIRPLANE CONTEST and corresponding book by Klara Hobza is a multifaceted artwork inspired by a historic paper airplane contest that took place in 1967 at the Great Hall in what is now the New York Hall of Science. Built by Wallace K. Harrison to display rockets in the 1964 World’s Fair, the Great Hall is a secular cathedral of concrete and colored glass; for Hobza’s one-day event, this unique location will harbor aircraft of a different scale.

The competition is open to the public, and participants are invited to fly their planes in any and all of the judging categories listed below:

• Distance flown (measured in a straight line from start point to finish point)

• Duration aloft (measured from time released to time it lands on any surface)
• Beauty (subjective measurement based on judges’ assessment of both the plane’s physical qualities and the beauty of the flight itself; this category does not depend on distance flown or duration aloft)
• Spectacular Failure (subjective measurement based on the audience’s assessment of both the plane’s physical qualities and the most spectacular crashes)
• Children’s division (competition for participants under ages 13)
• Surprise category

Airplanes may be folded from letter-size paper, up to 8.5″ x 11″ / A4, or smaller; larger sizes are not allowed. The paper should be an average office paper (20-24 lb weight). Cutting and minor gluing of your airplane is permitted; stapling is not.

Visit the Public Art Fund site for preregistration and additional info – New Millenium Paper Airplane Contest

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When I was working for Wired, we coined the term jitteratti (what the digerati become after too many cups of coffee). Caffeine and tech journalism (all journalism, for that matter) seem to go hand-in-hand. So it’s sort of fitting that Wired is doing a Starbucks art contest. The idea is to make something cool and interesting exclusively out of Starbucks junk (cups, stirrers, drink holders, etc). Tape, glue, and string are allowed. There doesn’t appear to be any prize for the winner, except coverage on the site. C’mon Wired, pony up something decent.

To inspire you, Wired posted this incredible TIE Fighter, made by Wired photographer Dan Winters.

Contest: Make Art From Starbuck’s Junk [via Bonnie Burton's Twitter feed]

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At Maker Faire Austin, Evil Mad Scientist Labs was demonstrating some really simple and useful circuits powered by solar cells. Today, they’ve posted the details on their site.

Interruption-resistant direct drive:
The “direct drive” circuits work well for their design function, but are rather basic. They provide no energy storage, and so are quite vulnerable to blinking out when a bird or cloud passes overhead. For some applications, like running a small fan or pump, that may be perfectly acceptable. For other cases, like powering a microcontroller or other computer, a brief power interruption can be disruptive. Our next circuit design adds a supercapacitor as a “flywheel” to provide continued power during brief interruptions.

Adding a microcontroller:
Our last circuit examples extend the previous designs by adding a small AVR microcontroller. We use the voltage output from the solar panel again to perform darkness detection, but instead take it to an analog input of the microcontroller. The microcontroller is potentially a very low current, efficient device that lets you save power by not running the LED all the time, but (for example) waiting until an hour or two after darkness and/or fading the LEDs on or off, or even intermittently blinking for very low average power consumption.

Simple Solar Circuits

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This is a really cool project posted by our friends over at instructables.com. Learn how to make it here.

Of course if you have the skills to make something like this be sure to enter our huge Halloween DIY Contest when you have the chance. Time is running out!

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