Crowdfunding now
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CROWDFUNDING
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When backing a crowdfunding
campaign, you are not purchasing
a finished product, but supporting
a project working on something
new. There is a very real chance
that the product will never ship
and you’ll lose your money. It’s
a great way to support projects
you like and get some cheap
hardware in the process, but if
you use it purely as a chance to
snag cheap stuff, you may find
that you get burned.BUYER
BEWARE!he Apollo series of missions put a man on the moon
almost fifty years ago. This was two years before Intel
made the first microprocessor, when computers were
cumbersome things. The Apollo Guidance Computer was
the only computing power on the rocket, and astronauts interacted
with it via the Display&Keyboard (DSKY) interface.
The Open DSKY is a reimplementation of the original system on
the Arduino platform and packaged in a replica of the DSKY which is
available in 3D printed plastic, steel, or (like the original) aluminium.
The metal ones don’t come cheap though, with the aluminium option
selling for $8 000. As well as the original functions, the Open DSKY
comes with the ability to play sounds – something which may come in
handy for users who don’t happen to need the landing calculations for
a lunar module.
The project has already reached its target, but they are only making
100 of the limited edition computers, so you’ll have to be fast if you
want to own one (they also have non-limited edition kits available).oice-controlled AI home assistants are everyday
now, but most of the popular commercial options
are run by companies that are interested in
collecting all the data they can about you to power
their advertising and sales machines. Mycroft, however, is an
open source, privacy-orientated assistant that you can be confident
isn’t amassing your personal data for some shadowy company’s
commercial gain.
Mycroft is powered by skills, with each skill relating to a
particular ‘thing’ that it can do. For example, read a Wikipedia
page or set a countdown timer. Many of these skills have been
developed by the community of developers contributing to the
open source project. It’s worth taking a look at the available skills
before committing to the project to make sure it supports the
things you want to work with. If you can’t wait until December,
download the current version of the software for a Raspberry Pi
or Linux device.T V
OpenDSKY Mycroft Mark II
Recreation of Apollo guidance computer Privacy-focused home assistant
From $350 kickstarter.com Delivery: June 2018 From $99 kickstarter.com Delivery: December 2018