I got a chance to talk to Pierce from Logos Electromechanical this weekend at Hackerbot Labs. He showed me some of the new boards (1x3 series and high current arduino shield) that just came in from being manufactured. They look very cool. He also showed me a Rev. 3 board (not assembled) of the Zigdunio. He mentioned that he was getting a lot of interest so far from people around the community that want to integrate RF into their project without having to buy an Xbee Module and shield. It also looks like it has made it onto Wikipedia under the “Shield-compatible clones” section.

The Arduino UNO came out last week. The big difference in this version is the lack of an FTDI chip. It was replaced with a Atmega8U2 programmed as a USB-to-serial converter. Check out the new design and more about the features here. Adafruit had it on their ”Ask an Engineer” episode this weekend too.

I have a lot of projects going on right now and one of the biggest annoyances when working with electronics is dangling wire from a board to the breadboard. I have seen some starter kits that come with an acrylic base that has an Arduino and a breadboard mounted to it. I decided to make my own and it turn out pretty well.

I also got to see a 1 watt blue laser diode this weekend which was pretty awesome. Here’s a pic with the lights off and a smoke machine going.

On a last note, I put some more information down about an event that’s coming up in Kalamazoo, MI. I am putting together a little hardware workshop to build and give away Metaboard kits. The Kits are mostly compatible with the Arduino platform and are insanely cheap. More information on that here.