Bug Labs is excited to announce the Open Hardware Summit in conjunction with MAKE, and Creative Commons, and a little help from our friends at NYSCI, littleBits and Eyebeam!

The Open Hardware Summit will be a venue to present, promote and discuss the undergoing open source hardware movement. The summit will focus on hardware as a system, involving conversations on software, manufacturing, legal, and other factors surrounding open source hardware. It is taking place on September 23rd, at the New York Hall of Science – right before Maker Faire.

Open source hardware has a growing community around it – enough that we figured would fill a moderately-sized lecture hall. Together we are revolutionizing the method, processes and means in which electronics are made, and a lot of us have been doing this for several years now.  Mentoring and sharing are always an important piece to any open source project, so our goal is to have an entire day filled with mentoring and sharing of knowledge about the open hardware industry, how we aim to license open source hardware, and why it is an important charge to lead.

For more information on the Summit, please visit openharewaresummit.org.

I’d like to thank Ayah Bdeir for co-chairing the event with me, we both hope to see you there!

Paro the Baby Seal is probably the most adorable robot Bug Labs has ever seen. BUG and Baby Seal met at CES 2009. Paro is a therapeutic robot that interacts through sensors when squeezed or pet. Paro is often found in hospitals or nursing homes, soothing humans and batting its big loveable eyes. Baby Seal especially liked jamming out to the Phunky application, using BUGsound and BUGmotion on the BUGbase and uploading the app via Dragonfly. BUG hopes Baby Seal will visit the NYC office soon. See the Baby Seal in action:

Bug Labs was at the Austin Maker Faire this weekend, where we won a Editor’s Choice award from Make! We were really honored to be part of Maker Faire and excited to show everyone our product!

Just before Maker Faire, at our Open House, we got our breakout board module (The Von Hippel) talking to an Arduino mini! It was a collaborative effort with help from NYC Resistor, who brought us a much needed R232 to TTY chip at a moment’s notice.

The folks at Maker Faire enjoyed clipping together modules together and coming up with new module ideas we should consider for the future, such as the Jelly Bean module and a Robot Wheels module (pictured below).

Hope everyone enjoyed seeing demos of the Bug! If we took your picture with the DrawPad app, check for it on Bugnet!  View more pictures of Bug Labs at Maker Faire here!

Meet your fellow geeks out tonight at Ignite! Ignite is an O’Reilly sponsored community event that takes place in many cities around the world. It consists of a series of speakers who are alloted 20 slides at 15 seconds per slide, with topics ranging (as O’Reilly puts it) from Soldering, to Guerilla Knitting and Bomb Shelters. Ignite can be started anywhere by anyone, like an open source event!
The NYC Ignites have also included competitions, organized by Bre Pettis. Tonight September 15, at 7:30pm. Anyone can decorate a cupcake and the most creative cupcakes wins, it’s first come first serve and there are only about 200 cupcakes, so get there on time! You are also free to bring your own decorations. Yours truly, one of the newest additions to Bug, will be there judging the contest. Perhaps my prior “cake hacks” got me the job? After the competition, speed talks will pursue, at 5 minutes per speaker, on many interesting topics from Web3.0 to carbon footprints.  Ignite will take place at New World Stages (340 West 50th Street). Hope to see you there!