Our friends at Adafruit Industries just announced FLORA, a new wearable electronics development platform.

For the last few years Ladyada has been thinking about everything she wanted in a wearable electronics platform for Adafruit's community of makers, hackers, crafters, artists, designers and engineers.

The swell hackers at Adafruit Industries have declared a winner in their cash-prize contest to reverse-engineer the Microsoft Kinekt controller and release a free/open library that would let hardware hackers incorporate it into their own projects. The winner is a fine gent named Hector, who says, "Here's my take on the Kinect driver. — Read the rest

The Adafruit KB2040 – RP2040 Kee Boar Driver is a development board designed specifically for custom mechanical keyboard projects ("keeb" builds). It uses a Raspberry Pi microcontroller chip and can be programmed with CircuitPython, MicroPython, or C/C++. It's only $8.95.

Our friend John Park used one to create a keyboard that runs Doom when you press a special key. — Read the rest

Another World (Out of This World in the U.S.) is a true classic, a title not only loved for its outstanding design, art and gameplay but studied in exhaustive detail because of its excellent implementation and author Eric Chahi's commentaries. — Read the rest

The Magic AI Storybook combines technology, storytelling, and craft to create a book that generates an unlimited number of stories. It uses a Raspberry Pi running ChatGPT connected to a seven-inch touchscreen and a few accessories, like a magnetic reed switch, a NeoPixel indicator light, a 7-inch touchscreen, and a USB microphone. — Read the rest

Over on Adafruit, our pal John Edgar Park has a fantastic tutorial up on replacing the brains of a Fisher-Price See N Say toy with a CircuitPython-powered KB2040 microcontroller so that you can make it say whatever you want.

John made a "City Sez" toy that plays back urban sounds like a fire engine, police siren, dog barking, jack hammer, etc. — Read the rest

If you've ever had a Talking Pee-wee Herman doll, you know that the messages you get by pulling the string on his back get garbled after time and use. His recorded catchphrases, which include "I know you are, but what am I?" — Read the rest

Adafruit has an interesting (and alarming) piece about an incident of invasive and bizarre facial recognition law enforcement:

When Kelly Conlon joined her daughter's Girl Scout troop for a fun outing to see the Rockettes perform their Christmas Spectacular show at Radio City Music Hall in New York, she had no idea she would end up booted from the show once she entered the building.

Joe Grand used a Raspberry Pi Zero and flat speakers to make a super-thin boombox. He commissioned Mar Williams to create the art. Build one yourself with Joe's instructions.

Combining 1980s music culture with a retro future, The World's Thinnest Boombox is a portable sound system featuring active electronics mounted onto an artistically designed printed circuit board.

Component suppliers to the makerverse, Adafruit Industries, have done it again in releasing a cool and funny electronics project in search of meme status.

Forget the fear-mongering, nothingburger Halloween broohaha over candy-colored Fentanyl, it's Doom in your kid's candy bars you need to be concerned about. — Read the rest

In response to recent allegations of tournament chess cheating, our friends at Adafruit Industries decided to get cheeky with the news and demonstrate how one could put together a wireless haptic communication system to wear in your person. As you might imagine, their tutorial is full of inyourendos:

Social media is abuzz lately over the prospect of cheating in tournament strategy games. Is

Does this sound familiar? A new technology comes to market and naysayers, skeptics, and Luddites proclaim the end to all that's good, holy, and human. As media studies scholar Rachel Plotnick discovered, that's how people reacted in the late 19th century with the introduction of the electric push-button. — Read the rest

The Altar I is a low profile and wireless mechanical keyboard with a very particular aesthetic that reminds me of old-timey Apple, Teenage Engineering and phone handsets designed for the vision-impaired.

Altar I focuses on one idea: Less, but better. A precision machined aluminium monobody.

Here's a gallery of 20 Vintage Photographs of People With Their Commodore 64s. The machine celebrates its 40th birthday this year, and goes from strength to strength in its technical dotage. The company itself won't be celebrating, of course—even the licensing outfit that apparently owns the brand is now bankrupt—but fans have big plans. — Read the rest

A month or so ago, in my online travels, I ran across an offer to get a "free, full-color" Estes rocketry catalog. I was shocked and delighted to learn that a proper paper catalog still existed.

I had lived for the Estes catalog when I was a pre-teen and teen. — Read the rest

Our pals over at Adafruit have been working on super-small, super-sharp and readable DOOM gaming device (it does more than DOOM, but hey … DOOM!). Phil Torrone writes:

DOOM is often the "hello world" for what's possible on hardware, particularly when there's a screen and some button inputs.

This past year, in my weekly maker tips newsletter, Gareth's Tips, Tools, and Shop Tales, I started a semi-regular column of jargon, slang, and technical terms that I thought would be informative and/or entertaining to my readers.

Here is the collected list for 2021. — Read the rest

I do a weekly tips newsletter for DIYers of all kinds. For the third year on Boing Boing, here is my year-end round up of my favorite newsletter entries. If you want to see more of this sort of content, please subscribe. — Read the rest

When Prince changed his name to a signature glyph in 1993, Warner Brothers issues a 3.5-inch floppy with the symbol as a font so that print publications could use it instead of saying "the artist formerly known as Prince."

In 2014 Anil Dash acquired a copy of the floppy for his collection, and just last week he took it to his friends at Adafruit to extract the data. — Read the rest

My friend John Edgar Park alerted me to these wireless LEDs "that are powered via induction, just like a toothbrush or iPhone charger." He has published a tutorial on how to add them to a model car.

[image: John Park]