For everyone out there who follows the site I have to apologize for the lack of postings over the past two months. I’ve been a bit busy with some other things I have going on currently and my projects have been pushed aside a bit. That being said I’ve been able to start moving towards finishing a lot of things I have going on and I wanted to update everyone.

It just so happens that my cleared up schedule coincided with and interesting challenge that’s been floating around the internet for a while. It’s called the Red Bull Creation Challenge and this year I am participating in the new format of the competition. The first round of the competition centered around a custom Arduino created by Red Bull and sent to participants called the Bullduino. As you can see in the image it is a very cool board that is definitely designed to sell Red Bull. It gives me some crazy ideas for some of the boards I’m working on if I can find the right facility to create them. With my Bullduino in hand I set off to build a project for round one; what I came up with was the Red Bull Slushie Maker. I thought it was an appropriate project for the weather we’ve been having in Saint Louis lately as it’s been over 100 degrees for quite a while. If you’d like to see more you can check out my video entry to the contest here and over the next week or two I will try to document the project too. Hopefully I’ll make it to round two of the competition and really put my skills to the test against some of the top makers and hackerspaces in the country.

Having completed that project and having some fun with it I am now moving back into my ShapeOko build and PCB creation. Those two things have both been in a holding pattern as I’ve been in contact with Edward Ford the creator of the project. There was a bit of a mix up in my kit, but Edward has been working to take care of it and has been really awesome in the fact that he’s offered me some upgrades and extras for the additional waiting time I’ve incurred. I’m looking forward to seeing what he sends me and I’m definitely ready to get the build together finally. Once I have my ShapeOko up and running I’ll be able to test some of the PCB’s I have designed for CNC and 3D printer control. They are currently based around the ATMega328, but after some testing to make sure they function 100% I’m hoping to move forward and modify them to use some of the newer hardware that I’ve seen in the Arduino Leonardo. Once I’ve finished with that I think I will have some nice designs to add to the Open Source Hardware movement and potentially make CNC and 3D printing even easier to control.

So that’s where things stand now, but over the next month you should be seeing a lot more posts and progress from me so stay tuned.