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Maker Faire Tokyo 2014 Pictures
Thanks to everyone who visited our booth at Maker Faire Tokyo 2014, which was held last weekend in Tokyo Big Sight in Odaiba.
We were busy at the booth, but still managed to sneak in some time to browse around. Here's a collection of some of the pictures we snapped, along with some commentary.
Here's our booth. Our clocks are prominently displayed, as you would expect, but we are also showing off some projects we did for consulting.
The Akafugu Booth
Highlights from our own booth include:
A new Nixie Clock: The Nixie Modular Clock. This version is a 4-digit IN-14 clock. We are also working on a version with IN-12 tubes, and hope to have these produced over the next couple of months. We brought a small number of these clocks as kits to sell at the faire, as a limited number prerelease.
LED Matrix 3x3. A tightly packed 3x3 matrix of the popular WS2812B single-wire RGB LEDs. These will be available on our store in packs of three shortly.
NFC Box with custom encloure. This is part of a consulting assignment. It supports NFC and Bluetooth Low Energy, and has a bright 8x8 LED matrix used for status indication (for when the user taps a card or interacts with the box via BLE).
Raspberry Pi Compute Module Base Board. The Raspberry Pi Compute is a great new embedded Linux Module from the Raspberry Pi team. The module is shaped like a memory module, and contains just the processor and storage. We created a base board for it with built-in 4-port USB hub, Serial console for debugging, and a soft power on/off button (for shutting the Linux system down gracefully before cutting off power).
VFD Modular Clock mbed IV-18 edition. A new version of our most popular clock, the IV-18 VFD Modular Clock. This version is based on mbed (rather than Arduino, that we use in our other kits), and is populated with SMT parts only. We plan to sell this on our site as a solder-free kit: You assemble the enclosure yourself, but all the electronics come pre-soldered.
4-screen OLED clock. A new clock concept that we are developing, where each digit is a 64x128 pixel black and white OLED display. The clock can display several fonts, and we plan to provide lots of different ones based on open source fonts.
Freetronics RGB LED Cube. Just like last year, the LED Cube and VFD Modular Clock IV-18 were our bestsellers.
Pictures from around Maker Faire
And now some pictures we snapped from various other booths. Most of these don't have any comments as we had limited time and didn't manage to get everyone's cards.
Tokyo Hackerspace was at the neigbor table as usual. Thanks for all the stickers! We will be doing a soldering class at their space in Nogizaka mid-december where we will solder the VFD Modular Clock.
The Emerge+ booth. Yamada-san showed off nice enclosures for Raspberry Pi A+ and B+, as well as a very cool VESA mount for RPi/Beaglebone black. The second picture shows an enclosure for the LPCLINK2 debugger (we bought this last year!)
All our acrylic enclosures are cut by Emerge+.
Toshiba FlashAir Wifi SD cards are wifi-equipped SD cards that are most commonly used for wirelessly syncing pictures from digital cameras. It seems that Toshiba is in the process of opening up the API for these devices, which allows them to be used for all sorts of other cool things. Control from an Arduino is possible via the SPI interface, and you can use it as an internet gateway, either serving log files you generate on your Arduino, or using the built-in http client. The developer site is available in both English and Japanese, but currently, the Japanese site has far more information.
Nixie wrist watch with 4 IN-17 tubes. Runs off AAA batteries.
Nixie tube production. These guys are Maker Faire veterans, and they always show off their cool Nixie creations. New this year were examples of Nixie tubes they produce themselves. We didn't get a chance to chat with them, so we don't know how far along they are, but the demonstration tube looked very impressive.
Relay Nixie Clock
Fisheye lens adapters.
Various other pictures:
