Image by Henrik Emtkjær Hansen

So.... It's been a little while since we sent an update, and its about time I let you all in on what we've been cranking away on. Sorry that it's gone on a little longer than we expected! Long story short, we've been hard at work since December hacking out what were going to call Upverter 2.0 and I wanted to give a little teaser for what to expect over the next 4-8 weeks.

Explore & Discovery

We have a big focus on making it easier to discover the things being done within the Upverter community. It's going to be dynamic, and largely driven by activity. Expect a lot of signs of life that are missing right now - things like a site wide activity feed. Inspired by this feedback:

• Show The Number Of Times Designs / Components Have Been Printed / Fabricated
• Add part quality / votes / ratings / star
• Don't start users with a blank slate
• Better Part Search
• Add Design Search

Parts, Generics, Easier Adding & Editing

Generics has been one of our biggest voids for a long time! The goal was always to make it incredibly fast and painless to create, add and refine parts used in a design - almost as if there were no library constraints at all. Long story short, we've failed to follow through on this. Until now! It's going to get worlds easier to add a part you haven't picked yet, to change values, to refine and to replace. Inspired by this feedback:

• Make It Faster To Add Simple Parts & Flags
• Need a Way To Add / Find / Place Generic Components
• Provide a component preview on the Add Component dialog pop-up
• Hierarchy/Tree of components in Add Component dialog pop-up
• Tidy up / Curate / Admin the current parts list
• Component Attribute Editor
• Add part quality / votes / ratings / star
• Better BOM Management
• Allow editing annotation text
• Grow the Parts Library
• Make adding a part more streamlined
• Add a Create New Button to the Add Component Dialog
• Properties dialogue for parts already placed

Manufacturing, BOM Management & Fulfillment

Over the past few months one of our super-secret projects has been our manufacturing and fulfillment dashboard. We are getting close to the end of development and are beginning the prep work to launch it. Inspired by this feedback:

• Offer a kitting / PCB ordering service for designs
• Show The Number Of Times Designs / Components Have Been Printed / Fabricated
• Better BOM Management
• Improve the End to End Product Design Workflow

Simulation

This is another of our super secret projects! We've put a lot of work into how to massively parallelize analog simulations in the cloud and it's beginning to bleed over into the rest of the Upverter products. Expect things like spice netlist exporting and simple analog simulation. Inspired by this feedback:

• Netlist Import / Export
• Spice Simulation For Analog Designs
• Design Rule Checks & Verification
• Verify my Design in RealTime
• Attach VHDL-AMS to Components and use it in Design Verification / Simulation
• Automatically Figure Out Good Design Rules

Schematic Import & Export

For the last 6 months we've been tirelessly investing, along with the open source software community, in a tool which allows our public open source json file format to be converted between all manner of schematic formats. There is a little stability work still left to be done, but we are getting very close. Inspired by this feedback:

• Import / Export
• Netlist Import / Export
• Import / Export in a Hardware Design Language (HDL)
• Extend import/export to parts
• Add a Print button or Export to PDF
• Support Altium alternate import formats

Layout, Footprint Generation, Gerber Export

This is the big one! I don't think its a secret that we've spent the last 6 months building a layout tool, but gosh is it ever hard to build a layout tool in a web browser! That being said we're close! We've started a small amount of testing thus far, and will be giving out more invites towards the end of May. Feel free to email support@upverter.com if you would like an invite to the closed alpha. Inspired by this feedback:

• PCB Editor
• IPC-7351 Land Pattern Footprint Generation
• Layout Optimization for Space Constrained Designs
• Better PCB Description & Routing Smarts
• Improve the End to End Product Design Workflow

Nets & Net Routing

Most of you love it. Some of you hate it. It's admittedly a little unpredictable at times. But stay tuned. We've planned out a block of time in the next development cycle to take a crack at making nets drawn in upverter a little more predictable, a little less frustrating, and overall easier to interact with. Inspired by this feedback:

• Add a Net Bus Tool
• Double-click to select an entire net
• Nets should be constrained to right angles as they are drawn
• Make Disconnected Net Creation Clearer

Phew! Its gonna be a crazy few months! And if you're not already a user, I urge you to sign up and hang on for what is sure to be a pretty monumental series of events for us and for hardware designers everywhere.

What a cool day!

Out of the blue we got a suprise visit from a cupcake delivery guy (I didnt even know they had those!). Anyway, true to his form this cupcake delivery guy gave us a whole stack of the most awesomely decorated and delicious cupcakes I have had in a damn long time. Well, make that ever... I dont think I've ever had a inductor cupcake before - but were about to start the trend, so watch out!

Turns out the cupcakes were care of our great friends, the rockstars over at iFixit. Thanks guys! What a cool treat!

A $6M hockey player isn't expensive anymore. It's sadly a reasonably affordable contract these days.

Unfortunately our local team, the Toronto Maple Leafs are, as ever, in a rebuilding phase. They lost, again, last night. They have to win every remaining game to have even a chance at the playoffs. Brian Burke, the GM, is trying to get legendary loudmouthed commentator Don Cherry fired. Cherry is apalled that the Leafs dont have enough local players. 

Besides mercilessly mocking the one founder who happens to be a massive Leaf fan, what can Upverter and the electronics world do to help? We were hacking away in our dowstairs lab but couldn't come up with a solution within the rule boundaries. Finally, we found a project out of the University of Manitoba. Meet your newest Toronto Maple Leaf, Jennifer!

Sure, she's a little slow on her feet. But she wouldn't be the only slow and high-priced member of the team; Tie Domi, anyone? And OK, she's not going solve the Leaf's Ontario problem, what with her roots in Manitoba. Not to mention that a female, robot hockey player is likely to make Don Cherry even more apoplectic. 

The good news is that she's stil in development and that the research team is furiously working on her skating and stick handling ability.  They have a much better chance of getting her up to snuff than the Leafs' coaching staff do. 

So keep your fingers and soldering guns crossed for your next Maple Leafs star! And maybe work on your own add-ons for her here at Upverter!

About Upverter

Did I mention that Upverter makes it possible to share designs for real things. There are thousands of high fidellity, accessible anywhere, publicly shared and open sourced designs waiting to be forked, manufactured, and hacked on. If you've got a design, you should share it! Need a design, find it! Or just explore for some inspiration.

Our user bmw8719, a.k.a. Brandon Wilson, has been working on a controller for his camera.

He's built his ETL project based on an ATTiny84 microcontroller from Atmel. Take a look at his schematic:

Thanks for the interesting work Brandon!

Most people loved Vijay Kumar's presentation at TED of the work being done in his GRASP lab at Penn. We did, Hackaday did, and Chris Anderson sure did.

Farhad Majoo at Slate did not. In fact, he sounds like he's ready to go all John Connor on us. 

About a year ago, Mellinger posted a video showing a team of three drones building structures out of large metallic beams. The machines fly in a terrifying, coordinated ballet, each of them picking up a beam, finding the exact spot where it should be placed, and gingerly snapping the object in place.

Stare at this long enough and you could mistake the scene for something adorable—birds building a nest. But by this time you’ve stopped staring. Instead, you’ve opened another browser tab to look for good deals on bomb shelters and MREs.

Upverter believes that robots are cool and that flying robots are REALLY cool! Designing a robot from scratch is a great way to bond with your kids, help them learn math and science, and show them what you can do with advanced calculus and n-dimensional matrix algebra. No more questions about what use does math have if they're optimizing the 4th derivative of a path for their flying robot <manjoo> OF DOOM! </manjoo>

One thing we did learn from Terminator 2 is that it takes a Robot to beat a Robot. So regardless of where you come down on the question of whether or not Penn's flying robots will kill us all, you should be building your own and designing them here on Upverter!

There was a guy on the Daily Show the other night talking about how the point of the space program was to beat the Russians. Not to make the world better. And when we won the Cold War we killed the space program. For proof, look at NASA today vs yesterday. Despite doing it for all the wrong reasons, it made the world better. We respected engineers and technologists more than at any other time in our history. Little kids grew up wanting to be tomorrow's heroes - engineers. In a small way the engineers of today are all reminicient of that. Flying shit is cool not only because it is a feat of engineering, but because it makes us dream of tomorrow. And it makes our kids want to be engineers again. Which is probably the most valuable thing we could ever hope to achieve.

About Upverter

Did I mention that Upverter makes it possible to share designs for real things. There are thousands of high fidellity, accessible anywhere, publicly shared and open sourced designs waiting to be forked, manufactured, and hacked on. If you've got a design, you should share it! Need a design, find it! Or just explore for some inspiration.

Like nearly everyone else, Upverter fell in love with this TED presentation by Vijay Kumar from Penn's GRASP lab. 

It shows you how much can be done with quadrotors and how they can be a platform for some very interesting projects. 

So head over to DIYDrones and pick up an ArduCopter or 3 and then design your own mini laser cannons (or other awesome drone fleet accessory) here on Upverter. 

We're going to be working on a fleet of flying robot bartenders. Shaken, not stirred, of course.

About Upverter

Did I mention that Upverter makes it possible to share designs for real things. There are thousands of high fidellity, accessible anywhere, publicly shared and open sourced designs waiting to be forked, manufactured, and hacked on. If you've got a design, you should share it! Need a design, find it! Or just explore for some inspiration

About a month ago The Pirate Bay launched a section of their site called Physibles [blog] [gizmag] [physibles]. I'm amazed by how huge this is. And almost equally amazed by how little its been talked about. I didnt think I'd be one to have to tell you why this matters, but alas, it looks like I am. You're welcome. Sorry it took me so long.

Collaboration and reuse are valueable

First and foremost. I want to let that sink it. Starting from scratch is painful and duplication of effort is ridiculous in the age of the internets. And the market is very, very good at removing inefficiencies. Look no further than Napster, released in 1999, 4 whole years before the iTunes store enabled access to media on the internet legally.

People are desperate to share

For a decade or so a small number of people have been sharing their designs for real things in impromptu message boards and phpBB forums. Its a horrible managomy of MS Paint drawn schematics, blinky text and scans of photocopies of pictures from (war era) text books. It's beautiful in its agressiveness, and provocativly resourceful. But terrible for how hard and unapproachable it makes it all look.

The Pirate Bay is responding to a very real need: the ability to share. Even things as seemingly esotaric as the designs for real physical objects. They will be shared. They will be used. And their availibility and ubiquity will only increase. Someday soon the designs for the next smartphone, or assult rifle will be just as easy to find pirated as Microsoft Office is today. Which leads me to my closing point...

Open source hardware as a deterant

Not unlike what happend in software the companies responsible for building the multitude of real things that surround us will come to a crossroads. Is their offering and their value stored in their designs? Their cad files? Or is it somehow secondary. MySQL, RedHat and JBoss all built very large and successful businesses around a secondary value, all the while giving away most of their IP. As a product maker is it your ability to design the next great smart phone? Or your marketing, manufacturing, distribution and supply nextworks that really matter? Or maybe its doing it first? Or doing it at all?

If you need an example of a company built ontop of open source hardware you need look no further than the every-man's 3D printer, the MakerBot. Since inception MakerBot Industries has opensourced the vast majority of their core IP. In otherwords you need not give them $1300 dollars and wait through months of backorders. You could buy all the parts in the design, assemble one from scratch, and even save yourself whatever margin MarkerBot would make from you. But their value somehow isnt in the design. Because despite being completely open source the vast majority of 3D printer owners own the product as produced by MakerBot.

Call to action

As you probably have already gathered I think this is a powerful and necessary step forward for the collaboration on and design of real things. I think in the months and years that follow this will be a blip on the radar. And it wont be long before its as common place to share models and designs as it is to steal music and movies.

About Upverter

Did I mention that Upverter makes it possible to share designs for real things. There are thousands of high fidellity, accessible anywhere, publicly shared and open sourced designs waiting to be forked, manufactured, and hacked on. If you've got a design, you should share it! Need a design, find it! Or just explore for some inspiration.