2013 Detroit Maker Faire

FEZ Medusa, an Arduino building block system, was introduced at maker faire. We were next to Microsoft, who built an amazing “social downpour” machine using our .NET Gadgeteer modules. It is a device that accepts tweets to vote to who gets showered. The acrylic was also cut and engraved by our laser service. Thanks to everyone that visited us and thanks to Microsoft for the great, and very much fun, demo.

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Very cool idea! I didn’t see much Medusa in that video, though…

A paper towel?! That all he got at the end? :smiley:

Looks like you guys had a lot of fun!

Medusa deserves its own post, coming in few days :slight_smile:

Nice job on all the acrylic Lazer work!

So Medusa is an Arduino with Gadgeteer connectors, then?

And the software behind it I assume.

Great stuff!!!

The social downpour reminds me of a similar idea I had when I installed or Nest thermostat at home. When I go out of town I would make my family earn air conditioning by soliciting tweets or likes. I think it would be hilarious but I would returned to new a new thermostat and new door locks.

Or, is it an Arduino shield which maps pins to Gadgeteer sockets?

Personally, I think it’s a bit disingenuous to call it a [em]mainboard[/em], when it’s really a kind of an [em]extender[/em], in that it doesn’t actually function as a mainboard by itself, and requires an intermediary device.

It’s certainly not a $10 mainboard, because for $10 you don’t get a mainboard, you get a board with Gadgeteer sockets that can be controlled from another system. “Has 1.27mm pitch sockets” does not make it a Gadgeteer mainboard, in my opinion.

@ godefroi - There are 3 different medusas. Only one of them is a shield. The other two have AVR on them.

Also they call it a mainboard not “a Gadgeteer mainboard”, although I see the confusion.

The announcement comes in few days. This will be cleared I hope.

There are 2 mainboards that have an micro controller. There is also a shield.

Hm. I’m a whole lot less excited than I was previously.

Because it is not a Gadgeteer mainboard?

Because it’s an Arduino with Gadgeteer sockets. There’s lots of really cheap Arduinos out there, and if you haven’t bought into the Gadgeteer module ecosystem (and I haven’t), it’s nothing but a really uninteresting Arduino variant.

I get that people are really excited about the big, fast, lots-of-RAM boards (G120, G400, etc), but it’s the little ones that excite me. On the big end, nothing can compete with the RPi, it’s the little end where it gets interesting. I was hoping for a small, cheap NETMF board.

RPI? Yeah we support that as well :slight_smile: You need to see the announcement. It is very hard to please @ godefroi but we will keep trying :wink:

@ Gus - I don’t think he joined insider section and you have announced it there.

It is easy! Start selling cerb40 for $10 :wink:

I know and so the suggestion “wait for announcement before judging”. This doesn’t mean he will approve after seeing but at least he will have more info.

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I’ve been trying to join insider, it’s been unavailable since the site changeover.

Selling Cerb40 for even $20 would make me very very happy. Shipping the board with the GCC community firmware would make me even happier. I do think that including the regulator by default on the v2.0 is kinda a bummer…

What do you see when you visit this page?
https://www.ghielectronics.com/community/insider