The Roly Kit storage box. I vaguely remember seeing these things from my childhood, sometime in the 80′s, but that was a long time ago.  I think I had totally abolished these things from memory…until a year or two ago, when one of our members brought one to hack night filled with lots and lots of electronic components.  We’ve all used the tiny drawers for parts storage, like the ones on our workbenches.  I even have a more modular one that has a handle to carry it around, but nothing compares to the storage capacity of the Roly Kit.

After admiring the sleek rolling storage for so long, I finally decided that I had to have one.  Doing a little research, it appears these things were invented sometime in the 70s, and made by a company in the Netherlands.  Sadly, the only reliable place I’ve seen them for sale is eBay, and occasionally a thrift shop.   They appear to come in a few colors and 2 different sizes (‘big’ and ‘medium’). If you’re a maker and need a nice travel friendly holder for all your resistors / caps / knobs / switches / 555 timers, I recommend you snag one up too.

So it appears the BullDuino has another hidden morse code message on it.  We smell something wargamesish.

— UPDATE —

Looks like the decoded message is ‘Wouldn’t lou prefer a good game of chess?’ …. is LOU a typo instead of YOU ?  L is inverted Y in morse code…  could be.  Or could be a clue.

This is obviously a quote from (or a play on a quote from if Lou is real) from WarGames.  Hmm.. 1983… Global Thermonuclear War. Joshua/WOPR  WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

Hooray for Redbull Creation 2012!  So it all starts with this Bullduino provided by RedBull.  Here are the initial unboxing pics.  So far it appears to be an Ardunio Uno layed out on a cool RedBull logo pcb.  I’m going to investigate deeper…

I entered the Panavise Facebook contest in December and won!  Weee!  I posted a time-lapse video of me assembling a Drone Lab kit from Casper Electronics using my Panavise Model 315 on Panavise’s Facebook page and was informed a few weeks later that my video was selected as the December winner.  And, boy, did Panavise come through with the swag.  Their prize package contained NINE individual products, as you can see in the quickie video below. (Sorry about the video quality, I loaned my really good camcorder to a friend so I had to use my iPhone 4S…)  Here is a link to the January 2012 GRIPnews Panavise newsletter where my win was announced.

You can purchase the Netduino from our Amazon Store for $34.95!

Hmm… What is a Netduino? Check out the next video from our Netduino Debut Tutorial for a demonstration!

The Netduino looks like an Arduino and it’s even compatible with the existing Arduino protoshields. However, it’s a completely different beast which can be programmed using Microsoft Visual Studio C#. Oh… It’s also Open Source. Pretty cool eh!