Headed by Jerry Jewel, SullTronix first entered the animatronic/professional haunt industry with their talking skull line.  Recently they have been awarded the IAHA 2009 best new product award for their new full skeletons.  Jerry’s group, ScareU, routinely produces some of the best haunted house attractions in the country.   Notice the electronics are hidden inside the bones, really professional work.  Pricing and purchasing information available on their website.

Nao from Aldebaran

The Aldebaran group has started hitting magazines such as Servo and Nuts and Volts with ads for NAO, their new humanoid robot.  Full production hasn’t begun yet, but you can order directly from their site.

As soon as I get my hands on one I’ll post a hacker’s perspective review.

Stay tuned…

If you don’t know who the Schmartboard guys are they make the surface mount ‘easy solder’ boards.  Basically you purchase boards that have a mask that is raised, so your surface mount parts fit down into ‘grooves’ in the boards.  Solderpaste is already there, and you simply tack the SMT part down.  

They also have recently launched the solder by numbers website, a social networking site for electronics geeks.  

I joined the site, and I’ll give a full review later.  So go register to win your free stuff.

Sometimes it pays to have a little production quality-  even if you are marketing to engineers.  I especially enjoy the parts in the video where her hand is in the way of the LEDs that are a prime part of that particular demo…

So go get some free samples, and see what you think.  May be overkill for simply an LCD driver, but depends if you want to integrate it into your project it may be a nice way to reduce part count.  Feel free to post thoughts here.

PRIMER 2 dev platform

The Primer 2 is an update from the original “circle” unit, the Primer 1, which inspired the Circle OS, an open-source software framework allowing easy development.

Primer 1 ("the circle")

The STM Primer2 is available for around $50.  A price compairson showed Mouser to be the cheapest vendor to sell the units directly.   Be warned, the direct vendor channel versions are limited in the code size that can be debugged.  STM  must be contacted directly for the full code-space versions.