| Welcome to another Good e-Reader Video Review. Today we are looking at the brand new Skytex Skypad SP727 Android tablet. How does it handle HD video, eBooks or top end games? We let you know exactly what to expect if you are thinking about buying this. The SkyPad SP727 has seven inch display screen with a resolution of 1024 x 600. Underneath the hood is a Cortex-A9 1.3 GHz quad-core Processor, 1GB of RAM and 8GB Storage. You can elect to expand it up to 32 GB via the Micro SD if that is not enough for you. Running on one of the latest Android operating systems, Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, the SP727 is equipped for you to surf the web, play apps, and read eBooks. The Skytex Skypad definitely contends with the big boys of 2014. Skytex really goes out of their way to make app discovery both simple and plentiful. HDMI out, a corner mounted camera, and enough processing power to run any app or game available in today's market makes the Skytex Skypad SP727 a quick, affordable, robust little tablet.
Video Review of the Skytex Skypad SP727 is a post from: Good e-Reader |
Sunday, June 1, 2014
Video Review of the Skytex Skypad SP727
Female Authors Overwhelmingly Depend on their Husbands to Write eBooks
| There is no denying that the Romance and Erotica genres are hot right now and the industry is mainly written by female indie authors. If you look at the iBooks the current top 100 authors is 64% written by women, Amazon has 56% and the Publishers Weekly top 25 has been dominated by women almost 100% for the last six months. Why is the vast majority of fiction and nonfiction writers women? The primary reason the vast majority of women are bestselling authors or aspiring writers trying to get their big break is because they rely on their husbands to generate the household income why they explore “their passion.” Many women authors have been quite vocal about how they are able to do what they love and rely on someone else to manage their life and keep the lights on. One author recently mentioned “Health issues forced me from the work place even before the economic downturn. Now my hobby is looking like it will support me as well as a 'real job' would have, all within the next few years. Can I say hooray?” Another author said “I had pretty much quit my day job to get a Master's Degree, but knew I’d have to go back to work as soon as I was done with classes. So, I began planning for it and while in the middle of writing papers – wrote my first two books. We can't live without my husband's salary / insurance yet.” Patrice Fitzgerald recently commented “I practiced law for 15 years but gave that up to write nearly 20 years ago now, getting close several times to the brass ring of a traditional deal and even a TV movie option, but never closing. Finally jumped into self-publishing in 2011, and now make a steady income from my own ebooks as well as a couple of other authors I publish. My husband works, and my income stream wouldn't allow us to live the way we want to, but I'm going in the right direction so that he'll be able to retire in about two years and I'll support us both. I'm looking forward to the day I make more than the six figures I did as a lawyer way back when…” Author k Baylor recently mentioned “I decided to quit my stressful day job at the end of January. I convinced my husband to allow me to pursue my dream of writing full time for a few months. I paid a few bills in advance to keep immediate pressure at bay and set out to do what I loved. For the first two months I worked primarily on my successful blog that helps other writers get information on publishing trends. After a bit of research I decided to start making writing my career. I write primarily in the erotica genre and published my first story on April 26th this year. So far I have five books live on Amazon as of today, many of those five titles were added at the end of this month (May) with over seven more in my pipeline. I have sold over 40 copies within my first month so I'm hopeful that it will increase with the amount of books I have for sale. I generally write under a pen name and have decided to write series under the romance genre as well.” Aspiring author G.S Jensen is happy about her situation “I politely "fired" all my editorial and programming clients on May 1st in order to write full-time. I am blessed with a wonderful husband who has a well-paying job; as such, the amount I need to contribute to our budget is relatively small. Even so, we waited until I had earned enough to cover that amount for twelve months before deciding I could take the leap.” There are hundreds of different women authors who rely on their husbands in order to pursue a career in writing. The vast majority fail and their only sales stem from family members and get lost in the slush pile. The few with a keen entrepreneurial spirit, savvy social media marketing and read editorials by Hugh Howey or JA Konrath stand the best chance at making it. There is no denying that the vast majority of self-published bestsellers on Amazon, Apple, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and Smashwords are by women. According to Author Earnings 59% of all Romance books are published by females, why? They simply are in better positions to be able to write and not worry about financially contributing. It is no small wonder that Sylvia Day and Stephenie Meyer managed to get their start and spend so much time online, and write, they had nothing else to do. Female Authors Overwhelmingly Depend on their Husbands to Write eBooks is a post from: Good e-Reader |
eBook Review: Sweet Tooth by Tim Anderson
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Sweet Tooth has every right to be filled with teen angst, only it’s too funny to be dark. Author Tim Anderson, who was available at a book launch party timed in conjunction with BookExpo America, is as funny in person as he is on the page, and his natural personality and voice come through in his tale that has every right to be a difficult and sensitive subject. Anderson spoke to Good e-Reader about the subject of the book and the publishing process. “It’s basically a gay, diabetic memoir of an adolescent in the eights. It starts when I’m fifteen years old when two striking events happened to me. Number one was my discovery of gay porno mags, and number two was my diagnosis as a Type I diabetic. I was a very religious little boy at the time, and I thought I was being punished for the former with the latter. In the summer of ’88 I was diagnosed with the high blood sugar they’d ever seen, and the book has these two threads going on.” While adapting to both of these truths about himself, Anderson paints certain scenes in this disconnected, third-person way that almost reads like a movie happening within the book. During the times in the story when the author’s blood sugar spikes and he’s out of himself, the reader is treated to the scene through the eyes of an outsider narrator. The cast of characters are as diverse and eclectic as any family and friends that most of us have but could be a little hard to understand at times; more importantly, though, (spoiler alert) an important character plays a role in the author’s story at the end of the book.
eBook Review: Sweet Tooth by Tim Anderson is a post from: Good e-Reader |
Top 10 Blackberry Apps of the Week – May 25 to June 1 2014
| Welcome to our first installment of the Top 10 Blackberry Apps of the week! Much akin to our Android list we compile once a week we will focus on a combination of native apps available on Blackberry World and ported apps available on Good e-Reader. Good e-Reader is the only mainstream website with advanced tools to allow the public to convert Android files to Blackberry Files. Learn more about our free APK TO BAR convertor. We spend around 30 hours a week testing popular Android apps on Blackberry devices such as the Playbook and Blackberry 10 OS. We recognize that Blackberry World is severely lacking with quality apps and no serious developers really make Blackberry a priority. This is why you won’t find Pinterest, Snapchat, Netflix, Hulu, or a thousand other great apps. We have them on our store and will showcase the best apps in a dedicated weekly segment. Are you new to sideloading Blackberry Apps on your Z10, Z30, Q5, Q10 or Playbook? Learn more about the process involved with our easy to use software and tutorial videos HERE. Snap2chat - Snap2Chat is the first and only native Snapchat client available for the BlackBerry 10 platform. It offers features available in Snapchat for iOS and Android in addition to multiple features available exclusively for the BlackBerry 10 platform. iGrann – The first full native and free client for Instagram on BlackBerry 10 is here. It is not just an Instagram viewer, it is a fully featured app. Food Network In the Kitchen – Get instant access to your favorite Food Network chefs and thousands of their most popular recipes with In the Kitchen, the award-winning, top-rated recipe app, now available for FREE! OLYMPUS Image Share – Paired with a compatible Olympus camera, the OLYMPUS Image Share smartphone app makes shooting more enjoyable than ever. With this app, images captured with an Olympus camera can easily be imported to a smartphone, and shared with family and friends. With OLYMPUS Image Share you can actually add Art Filters, one of the most popular features on Olympus cameras, to imported photos, use your smartphone as a remote control to a compatible Olympus camera, and also add GPS tags to photos. Swarm – Swarm, the new app from Foursquare, is the fastest way to keep up and meet up with your friends. With Swarm, you can easily see who's out nearby and who wants to hang out later. OI File Manager – OI File Manager allows you to browse your SD card, create directories, rename, copy, move, and delete files. It also acts as an extension to other applications to display "Open" and "Save" dialogs. Word Shift : Spell Skills – Improve your spelling/vocabulary skills while playing this uniquely fresh word game. Top multiplayer word puzzle game with realtime leaderboard ranking and online competition. Calculator Pro – Calculator Pro is designed for everyone looking for simplicity and functionality. You can enjoy using a standard calculator for basic operations or extend it into a scientific one for more complex calculations. Just tilt your Android device into the landscape mode! CNET Video+ – If you are a tech lover, and you have an Android device, you need the free CNET Video+ app. We bring you the best tech shows, gadget reviews, and all the event coverage you live for. CNET stars, including Brian Cooley, Molly Wood, Brian Tong, and Sharon Vaknin, reveal tech secrets that help you get the most out of your tech. Top 10 Blackberry Apps of the Week – May 25 to June 1 2014 is a post from: Good e-Reader |
Saturday, May 31, 2014
BookExpo 2014 In Pictures
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BookExpo 2014 In Pictures is a post from: Good e-Reader |
Author 
Smashwords’ CEO Mark Coker spoke to groups of authors at the BEA Author Hub about the options open to writers in the climate of digital publishing.
Ten bestselling indie authors joined forces for their own booth at the event, a few of whom are pictured here. (L to R: Jana DeLeon, Theresa Ragan, Denise Grover Swank, Liliana Hart, and Jasinda Wilder)
In honor of the poet’s 195th birthday, Walt Whitman made an appearance and signed illuminated copies of his poem, “Song of Myself.”
Readers waited in long lines for the opportunity to meet their favorite authors for book signings.
The Alliance of Independent Authors’ Orna Ross presents Mark Coker with the organization’s first distinguished award for service to the indie author community.
Educational ebook platform Qlovi, backed by funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, was presented with the second place award in the Startup Challenge. Sourcebooks sponsored the award, and it was presented by CEO Dominique Raccah.
Ingram sponsored the first place award, which was presented by Librify’s CEO Joanna Stone Herman to book data tracker company Next Big Book’s Alex White.Shebooks Launches Kickstarter Campaign for Equal Writes
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Shebooks is a short-form ebook service that offers stand-alone sales and subscription reading of their select titles. Their books are in the range of about fifty pages, covering non-fiction, long-form journalism, essay, literary fiction, and much more; serialization is also a concept that’s in the works. With a target audience of busy women who have to read in sprints as their schedules allow, Shebooks meets a need for content that can be enjoyed within a shorter time frame. “We're a new digital publishing company dreamed up by a journalist and a magazine editor who got tired of watching the space for quality women's writing in publications shrink and shrink and shrink. We decided to do something about it. We've pulled together an amazing team of experienced talent and started publishing great short e-books by women, for women. You can buy any book individually or get a Shebooks subscription to our growing library of titles.” As if launching the company wasn’t enough of a task, the leadership at Shebooks has launched a crowdfunded campaign to further works by women writers. Through a Kickstarter campaign to fund its Equal Writes initiative, the company plans to launch an ambitious program that will allow it to release two new titles a week. The campaign, which kicked off on May 27th, is already more than halfway to its goal of $50,000. For more information on the campaign or to lend support, visit HERE.
Shebooks Launches Kickstarter Campaign for Equal Writes is a post from: Good e-Reader |
Crowdfunding Opportunities for Authors Evolve with Pentian
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One of the biggest obstacles to crowdfunding books was solved when Pubslush launched its book-specific crowdfunding platform. Considered by its founders for be more of a focused pre-order site as backers receive a copy of the book, the site has an incredibly high success rate for helping authors reach their goals. But a company currently at work in the international book crowdfunding sphere is bringing its revolutionary concept in books to the US market. Pentian has upended the typical crowdfunding model of offering backers a few token gifts at various donation levels or a copy of the finished book, and instead gives backers a three-year license to earn a share of the royalties. Pentian was already established as a self-publishing company that developed both print and digital titles, but also had distribution networks in place to reach out to virtually every global market. After seeing a number of worthy manuscripts from authors who didn’t have the means to pay for top-notch editing or publishing services, the founders went looking for a crowdfunding option that would provide those funds while also offering backers the incentive to invest in those titles. Enrique Parrilla, co-founder of the company, spoke to Good e-Reader at BEA this week about the platform. According to Parrilla, the process of having backers who earn royalties correlates to that project receiving incredible discovery opportunities as the backers share the book’s news in order to boost their own interests in the revenue. “When we launched, we hoped to do 200 books in the first year,” Parrilla explained. “We did 200 books in the first eight weeks.” The only way a company can leverage that kind of volume in a successful way is through a network of freelancers, highly vetted professionals who take on the required tasks for publication. That workload sharing and crowd backing has already led to payoffs for a number of books.
Crowdfunding Opportunities for Authors Evolve with Pentian is a post from: Good e-Reader |
Goodereader Android App Store Client Updated
| We have updated the Good e-Reader Android and Blackberry 10 App Store client today with some fairly major enhancements. Chief among them is the elimination of the dreaded Force Close bug that has been plaguing us for quite sometime. Apparently it was due to an error in the app timing out when we added too many new apps at once. This is now solved and you should never again experience the app force closing or loading with no assets and then crashing. Although we solved a major bug with the app client we have added a number of other useful features. The home screen has received the bulk of the new enhancements with the ability to minimize the featured image carousel. In the past if you used our app on the Blackberry Q5, Blackberry Q10 or a phone with a screen less than 3 inches the featured images would take up half the screen. We have now added the ability to disable the slideshow, putting the priority on app discovery. Finally, we have increased the limits on app names on the home screen, so the full app name will now always be visible. The Good e-Reader App Store is the largest indie store in Canada with over 33,000 apps currently available for Android and Blackberry. We have a Developers Portal that allows creators to upload their app for free or monetize it with our paid app system. Download the Good e-Reader Android Client today and join in on the fun! Goodereader Android App Store Client Updated is a post from: Good e-Reader |
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Indie Excellence Awards Presented at BookExpo America
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But one other chief area who still bars entry to self-published titles are major book awards, which has prompted a number of prominent entities to establish national excellence awards to offer recognition to these works and their creators. The Indie Excellence Awards, established in 2007 to honor not only the writers and their works but also contributors like cover designers, layout artists, and more, presented its 2014 list of winners in conjunction with this year’s BookExpo America event. According to a release on this year’s competition, “Founder Ellen Reid, President & CEO of the National Indie Excellence Awards, announced the 2014 winners and finalists in categories that saw the greatest competition yet in an initiative that celebrates the best of books in print – which includes, covers, interior layouts, titles. in self-published or indie published books. The winners and finalists represent a diverse group of first-time authors and seasoned authors, major self-publishing groups as well as first-time publishing efforts.” “This year the expert team of publishing insiders who serve as judges of the NIEA, were challenged because of the quality of entries. I would have to say this was the fiercest competition we've seen. It's a new day in publishing in 2014," said Reid.
Indie Excellence Awards Presented at BookExpo America is a post from: Good e-Reader |
Apple Request to Delay Damages Trial Rejected by Appeals Court
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You’d think they’d learn. Instead, Apple filed motions last month to appeal Judge Denise Cote’s date for the damages portion of the ongoing case–damages which can be as high as 800+ million dollars, if punitive rulings are imposed–on the grounds that they were certain the case would be thrown out once it finishes with its appeal of Cote’s guilty ruling, making the damages trial a waste of time and money. Unfortunately for Apple, the Second Court of Appeals ruled this week that no delay was necessary. The appeal of the ruling against Apple is expected to take months in a trial phase that will begin July 14th. In related news, Amazon and Hachette Book Group–one of the publishers who settled out of court for its involvement in this case–are locked in battle over pricing terms. These terms were initially laid out as part of the settlement but are set to expire this fall, giving Hachette the option to once again attempt to impose agency pricing instead of the wholesale model that most entities operate under with Amazon. That battle has led Amazon to make some pretty fierce decisions about Hachette titles, including stating that titles were temporarily out of stock, removing the buy buttons on books for pre-order, and more.
Apple Request to Delay Damages Trial Rejected by Appeals Court is a post from: Good e-Reader |
IndieReader Announces IRDA Winners at BookExpo
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There is a first, second and third place winner in each of the fiction and non-fiction categories , in addition to 29 titles in 32 sub-categories, indicating that each book has received at least a 4-5 star review (out of 5 stars). Bestselling hybrid author and recent Authors Guild board member CJ Lyons was on hand to present the awards with IndieReader’s president Amy Edelman. The complete list of winners in each category can be found HERE. IndieReader has become known as a source of discovery for great reads by independently published authors, a designation which includes both self-published and small press works. IR features a number of initiatives to help authors promote their works, including its review site, it’s Alike But Indie comparison listing, and its initiative to put great indie titles in bookstores through strategic industry agreements.
IndieReader Announces IRDA Winners at BookExpo is a post from: Good e-Reader |
Onyx BOOX T68 Lynx e-Reader Available Soon
| Onyx has confirmed that their new T68 Lynx e-reader will be arriving at their warehouse within the next week and will be fulfilling outstanding orders to customers. New orders will be available via the Onyx Europe website and also on Amazon. The Lynx e-reader is very much akin to the Kobo Aura HD, in terms of specs. It features a 6.8 e-Ink capacitive Ultra HD EPD display screen and a resolution of 1440×1080 pixels. Underneath the hood is a Freescale i.MX Cortex A9 1.0GHz processor and 512MB of RAM. Books are stored on the device and has 4GB of internal storage with the option to increase it via the Micro SD Card. One of the things that separate the Lynx from most other ereaders on the market is that has it a 3.5mm headphone jack and the ability to play audio. Natively it will play MP3 and WAV audiobooks right out of the box, which is a boon to people who like to listen to music while they read. The software side of things are completely different from what Kobo is doing. Onyx has loaded the stock version of Android 4.0.4, which will allow users to load in their own apps. Onyx BOOX T68 Lynx e-Reader Available Soon is a post from: Good e-Reader |
Friday, May 30, 2014
Hachette Launches Store Within a Store Concept at Booksamillion
| Booksamillion is one of the last bookstore chains to be operating in the US and is the de facto number two, next to Barnes and Noble. The bookseller has inked a new deal with Hachette to pioneer a new online store within a store concept. Hardcover and softcover books are available to be purchased and customers can save up to 40% on new titles. A store within a store concept is a rather new endeavor with an established bookstore chain peddling Hachette titles. Why is this a big deal? Well Hachette and Amazon have been locked in a contract dispute that has seen pre-orders being disabled and five week shipping on most titles. Hachette is obviously looking to diversify away from exclusively relying on Amazon to generate 75% of their digital purchases. The deal with Booksamillion goes beyond just having a dedicated part of their website facilitating book discovery, sales and shipping. As part of the agreement Booksamillion will be promoting discounts and new titles with press releases and social media. Readers will benefit from saving 30% across the board on pre-order titles and the vast majority of Hachette backlist selection. In some cases discounts on hardcover editions are 40% off, giving customers the ability to buy them cheaper than Amazon. Hachette Launches Store Within a Store Concept at Booksamillion is a post from: Good e-Reader |
Kindle Cloud Reader Goes Global
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Unfortunately, Kindle Cloud Reader still doesn’t offer support for personal documents. Cloud-based reading apps are still in their infancy, and most consider them a back-up method of reading (as opposed to the native apps on every device)… But for those frequently on the move or using a large number of devices, a cloud reader gives them an option for consistency of interface and ease of use. Kindle Cloud Reader Goes Global is a post from: Good e-Reader |
Dragon Quest VIII Now Available for Android
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As expected, the graphics quality is amazing and the game-play feels more like it would on a console rather than a mobile platform. Less expected is that this 8th-installment of the Dragon Quest series is designed to be played with a single hand and in portrait mode. Luckily the followers of the series are a dedicated bunch because the price-tag is a hefty one for a mobile app, with a Canadian price tag of nearly $30. Thankfully this is all-inclusive and you do not need to worry about making a bunch of in-app purchases to further drive up the cost. Dragon Quest VIII Now Available for Android is a post from: Good e-Reader |
ISEE-3
| Back in early March, I posted comic #1337, Hack, about a wayward spacecraft. ISEE-3/ICE was returning to fly past Earth after many decades of wandering through space. It was still operational, and could potentially be sent on a new mission, but NASA no longer had the equipment to talk to it—and announced that reconstructing the equipment would be too difficult and expensive. ISEE-3 is just a machine, but it’s a machine we sent on an incredible journey; to have it return home to find our door closed seemed sad to me. In my comic, I imagined a group of internet space enthusiasts banding together to find a way to take control of the probe—although I figured this was just a hopeful fantasy. I wasn’t the only one who liked the idea of “rescuing” ISEE-3. In April, Dennis Wingo and Keith Cowling put up a crowdfunding project on RocketHub to try to learn how the lost communications systems worked, reconstruct working versions of them, obtain use of a powerful enough antenna, and commandeer the spacecraft. It seemed like an awfully long shot, but I contributed anyway. Well, yesterday, Cowling and his team announced, from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, that they are now in command of the ISEE-3 spacecraft. Congratulations to the team, and good luck with your new spaceship! Watch out for hackers. |
OverDrive Challenge last chance!
| Saturday May 31 is the last day to register for June's OverDrive Challenge! Join the many public library partners from across the globe that have already signed up and are ready for the challenge. There's no risk to you to participate – in fact, just for registering, you are automatically entered to win a Google Nexus tablet! The OverDrive Challenge for the month of June is to increase your digital library circulation to beat your best month on record. If you can increase circulation in June by 25% or 50% from your best month, you're a winner! If you reach these goals in June, your library will receive a prize of content credit or an exciting service enhancement of a Kids'/Teens' eReading Room (25%) or an OverDrive Media Station (50%). The library that increases their circulation the most out of everyone participating will receive a Gadget Jackpot, full of devices, content credit and more. Read more about the prizes and make sure to check out the official rules for more details about eligibility. This is an opportunity for you to find creative and innovative ways to spread the word about your digital collection to your community and find what works best for you. Every library is different and we're looking forward to seeing the many ways our partners are generating awareness about their eBooks, digital audiobooks, streaming video and music. We'd love for the OverDrive Challenge to be a catalyst for our partners to set more individual goals and see circulation growth month to month through promotion, education and collection development. For a few tips, click here to check out some suggestions about how to bring in new users, build your collection and jump into social media and remember, you always have access to the Partner Portal for marketing and training resources! Click here to fill out an entry form. The deadline for entry is Saturday May 31. Read full contest details and rules for more information.
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Amazon Still Selling Kindle DX International Version for $199
| Okay, so this is kind of odd. Amazon recently stopped selling the Kindle DX (for the second time) and since then the device has only been available used, and at majorly inflated prices. But if you know just where to look you can still find the Kindle DX for sale new on Amazon for the […] |
The Hugh Howey Booktrack Competition Open to Entries
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The first is a contest for fan fiction writers, who will craft their own original take on the structure, characters, setting, or more, before adding their own immersive soundtrack to accompany the work. Sponsored by Wattpad and Writer’s Digest, the winner will receive $5,000 and editorial feedback on the submission by Hugh Howey. The second concurrent contest is a soundtrack competition which invites participants to use the Booktrack Studio platform to build their own soundtracks to accompany one chapter of Howey’s work. The winner of that competition will win $5,000 and the chance to create the full sound track to accompany Howey’s novel The Hurricane. In order to get a feel for the competition, all users are invited to enjoy part one of Howey’s work Sand for free to experience an immersive music-based reading opportunity. For details on both competitions and to enter, visit Booktrack.com/HughHowey. Booktrack has already encouraged a strong user base, particularly in classrooms where teachers can craft their own isolated bookshelves for their students to use; moreover, their students can also create their own soundtracks to accompany their writings, leading to cross-curricular teaching units which combine English, music, history, and other subjects. Studies have already shown that reading comprehension and engagement with the text increased dramatically when students were allowed to use Booktrack, and opportunities for special education students are already in place.
The Hugh Howey Booktrack Competition Open to Entries is a post from: Good e-Reader |
Raspberry Pi projects at the Maker Faire Bay Area
| Recently a number of us were lucky enough to fly over to the Bay Area Maker Faire to represent Raspberry Pi at the event. For those who haven’t managed to make it to one before, these are festivals on a grand scale of all things craft, electronics, tech, and general making with the Bay Area Maker Faire being one of the largest. It had quadcopter fighting, a fire breathing metal octopus (yes, really), cupcake cars, robotics and cool projects from every corner of the maker community. Clive, Carrie Anne, myself, and the folks from Pimoroni spent a lot of time at the stand talking to Raspberry Pi fans one on one though in this post we’re highlighting some of the awesome Pi-based projects we managed to see on our visit. Our stand proved very popular not least because of the super fashionable Raspberry Pi branded tote bags and tradable resource cards we brought along to give out.  The calm before the storm For a taste of what a Maker Faire is like, look no further than Carrie Anne’s montage for Geek Gurl Diaries: One of my personal favourite projects was Mugbot, a social robotics creation from Seita Koike at Tokyo City University. It’s amazing how emotive this little fellow can be with just a few servos and some LEDs to express itself. It quite convincingly pulls off sad, happy, and angry among other emotions.  The translucent body represents imperfection as a humanoid Another exciting project was the Argus geodesic 3D scanner by Shannon Hoover. This is a dome which features 35 Raspberry Pi, using a Raspberry Pi and a Pi camera on each hub along with a custom board for LED lighting. Argus is used to take a picture of someone from all angles which can then be stitched into a full 3D model. You can see it in action in Carrie Anne’s montage. Right now the metal bars need to be bent, though the project creator is looking at using custom hubs (either 3d printed or eventually injection moulded) so that standard low cost metal tubes can be used.  1 of 28 images taken simultaneously by Argus Although Raspberry Pi was created with educational goals, it always pleases us to see it used as a prototyping platform or embedded in commercial products. One such project was Cultivar, which uses a Raspberry Pi, a high quality moisture sensor (capacitive as opposed to resistive), a USB WiFi dongle, a solenoid, and a whole bunch of neat software to enable your to observe and automate plant irrigation through a pretty web UI. The project aims to offer intelligent algorithms for water control to, for instance, give different amounts of water at different stages in the plant’s lifecycle while also taking environmental conditions into account.  Cultivar’s spindly spider-like legs may be problematic for arachnophobes We were pleased to see such a large number of young makers at the event (in fact, there was a whole hall dedicated just to Young Makers and their projects). We met some inspiring young people there – I’m tempted to pick up electric guitar playing just so I can use QV’s modular guitar design. Julian, Zach, Will, Cameran, Arjun, Mark and Dylan from Pleasanton, California told me all about their ‘Robot Pi’ project which consists of a Raspberry Pi-powered robot, the maze they had constructed, and a Python-based web server which allows you to control the robot through the maze and view the maze from the perspective of the robot’s camera. In the picture below the robot is tethered to its remote, though this is just as the team found there was too much interference in this electrically noisy environment. The Robot Pi team are a bunch of friends who wanted to pursue electronics in their free time, and were able to put on their stand thanks to a successful crowdfunding effort.  RobotPi navigates its maze Another young maker project we really enjoyed was the Cootie Catcher Choir by Zander Roe and Brian Roe pictured below. Carrie Anne interviewed Zander about his work, who explained to us how he uses an Adafruit 16-channel servo driver breakout board to drive the servos connected to gears at the back of the cootie catcher wall. It may not be clear from the pictures, but it works by pressing a button on the project’s web interface to cause one of the mouths to open and emit a note of a certain pitch.  Cootie Catcher Choir by Zander Roe We were excited to see so many awesome projects using the Raspberry Pi in some way at the Maker Faire and really enjoyed speaking to all the makers about their work. I know there are many, many more we either didn’t see or didn’t manage to write about. If you know of any, please leave a note in the comments.  Transform your Raspberry Pi |