Building a Custom Solution for Farming

When Farmhand Automation set out to create autonomous micro-tractors to help small farmers grow their business, they quickly realized they needed a low cost, open source CAN/Modbus alternative. After creating an initial prototype, Farmhand Automation’s founder, Alex Jones, reached out to design a custom board to meet their needs. By collaborating with us, Farmhand Robotics was able …

Finding Missing Objects with RFID, Part 2

Welcome back to the thought experiment journey I’m on to learn the best way to find a lost frisbee. Thanks so much to everybody who commented on the last post with ideas on which technologies you would use to approach this problem. I think that’s why I like this challenge in the first place – there are …

Finding Missing Objects with GPS

You know how wonderful it is that our products have crisp, high resolution, large photos? You can zoom in and see every single aspect and component on the PCB. Well, that’s thanks to meticulous photographer, Juan. He came to me a few weeks ago with a problem he was facing in one of his other …

Get a Better Night’s Sleep with Technology

Sleep (slēp, sliːp) noun The resting state in which the body is not active and the mind is unconscious. I start this blog with a definition of sleep because it can tend to be somewhat of a foreign concept to engineers and makers (and of course, students). For those of us with a delayed sleep-wake phase who still …