Hi everyone!
CM version of this blog was already posted here: https://circuitmaker.com/blog/oakland-meetup-user-interviews-oshwa-summit
It’s great to see so many new projects all the time. With almost no input from Altium to this Upverter community it speaks volumes to see the momentum here. This is in spite of some people that would cast doubt over the future of this product.
We announced earlier that CircuitMaker is going to be renamed “Upverter Desktop”. We are working to merge the communities and data together – so Altium R&D and Upverter R&D teams have become a single unit collaborating across Kiev, La Jolla, and Toronto offices. These fine factories are feverishly coding to ensure data and user accounts can be brought together without loss of fidelity. As technical folks, you’re no doubt aware this is not trivial. Naturally it will take a bit of time, but so far our R&D team tells me it’s pressing forward, and later this year or early next we’ll have our sites merged and hope to have some beta testing going on well before that.
Meanwhile Upverter is here en force, and we want to keep the ball rolling on all the cool designs and community content being produced. So keep up the great work. There’s more info coming soon, but I’ll give you a tip – we’re rolling out a user generated content incentive program this month. I’ll blog separately about that soon.
In other news, we just had our Oakland meetup event, graciously hosted by Circuit Launch by Oakland airport. These guys have a really big nice workspace for startups to come in and get some serious robotics and 3D printing done, among other things. While we were there I was privileged to get some neat interviews with a few people, working on interesting projects. Check these out below…
Karlis Veilands shares his build of BlueSaab 6.1 – designed in CircuitMaker by Seth Evans – and explains the movement of “Saab addicts” who needed a solution for integrating Bluetooth audio connectivity into their 1990s-2000s Saab 93 and 95 models, replacing the old factory CD changer with this module to provide all modern conveniences of phone connectivity in the high-end audio system of these luxury vehicles. There are now quite a few BlueSaab users and a vibrant forum and community support the product. It’s for communities of collaborators like this that we wanted to make sure the open source community had access not just to PCB tools, but the most productive.
Alex Wayne is a software developer by day, and an LED kinetic sculpture artist by night. What do you need when your normal line of work is not doing hardware, but you need to do hardware efficiently for your side projects? You turn the the most productive tools with the simplest user interface that’s what! And in Alex’s case, he switched from EAGLE and KiCAD in his earlier attempts to Upverter. Now he’s designing boards for some pretty amazing APA102 LED based kinetic art sculpture work – commissioned by the city of Santa Rosa CA. See his interview to discover more about this interesting project.
Our next meetup isn’t actually ours!! Our next meetup will be the Open Source Hardware Summit – this Thursday at MIT in Boston. We’ll be emailing the CircuitMaker and Upverter Bostonians in a day or two with more details. We would certainly love to see you there! But even if you can’t get the day off for Thursday, perhaps we could catch up Wednesday evening at a pub in Cambridge? Either way, I hope to see you there or at our next meetup which will be in the Los Angeles CA area. Keep designing cool stuff and I’ll report back here again soon!
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