This post is to preview some of the stuff that I've been working on for the Rascal. Suppose you want to build a pulse counter so you can tell how fast a motor is spinning. The pulses are coming out of the motor at around 10 kHz, i.e. at…

One of the early Rascal customers was the Massachusetts General Hospital Learning Lab. The Learning Lab has been developing an attendance tracking system using 125 kHz RFID cards. In their current system, each card reader talks to an Arduino microcontroller using the Wiegand protocol; the Arduino talks to a PC…

One of the Rascal accessories I've been working on for scientists is what I call the Precision Voltage Shield. It's a circuitboard that plugs into the Rascal or an Arduino that allows you to measure 8 voltages very precisely. Yesterday, I got the precision voltage shield working as an 8-channel…

There's a Rascal customer (let's call him "Justin") in Arlington, MA, USA, who has been building his young daughter a dollhouse over the last year or so. At some point, Justin decided that he would like to add lights to the dollhouse and control them from his iPad.…

##### The opening event at the light blades. I'm the guy on the stage in the hat. ##### The Rose Kennedy Greenway is a 15 acre park that was created in 2008 when route 93, the main highway through Boston, was put underground. In the middle of the Greenway, there is a…

In late December, we held the first Rascal "Hack Afternoon" at Tufts University in Medford, MA, USA, just over the town line from Rascal headquarters in Somerville. The Tufts Center for Engineering Education and Outreach (CEEO) had recently bought several Rascals, and they wanted to get off to…

I hit a personal milestone today, but I have to tell a little of the backstory for it to make sense. Back in early 2010, while working as an embedded systems engineer at a company that subsequently failed, I built a web-based thermostat using an off-the-shelf Linux board. It took…

Most of the robotics industry is devoted to industrial machines, like welding robots, or military robots, like the terrifying stuff that Boston Dynamics builds. Makerspaces like Somerville's Artisan's Asylum, where Rascal Micro has its headquarters, are helping to make robotics more accessible to the general public. Back in September, the…

This dramatic story is entirely true. A few days before the Maker Faire in New York, two large boxes arrived from the assembler containing a total of 104 Rascals. I unpacked the first bubble-wrapped pack of 6 and plugged one in. Nothing. No cheery green power LEDs. Something was wrong.…

Wednesday night, I'm headed down to the Open Hardware Summit and World Maker Faire in New York City. If you're in the neighborhood on Saturday or Sunday, stop by the Rascal booth at Maker Faire. It will be in the Arduino Pavilion, which is in Zone C. I'll have a…