Over the winter, I refined my beginner robotics course into a kit that could be easily accomplished by anyone looking for a good intro into electronic circuits and robotics.  This May, Boise Community Ed has been courageous enough to give us a class on the 5th and 12th and and it is sure to be a blast.  We have been hard at work making an easy tutorial that not only describes this new light following creature’s capabilities and pieces, but explains how anyone might be able to improve, personalize and re-invent the project with the OSHW open hardware license.  This new hands on workshop and project will hopefully be a great starting platform for new inventors, young and old alike.  Our kit has been named Lux Creatura, a loose latin name meaning “light creature” since Dave has decided to start naming his kits as new species… For more information on the class, feel free to visit Boise Schools Community Education.  Thanks, and we hope to see you there!

Flashing red lights...

Our new room will be open, hell or high water on April 1st, and that’s no joke.  We will be celebrating our newly expanded space with extended hours, 10am to 7pm, and in store promotions like raffle for stickers and other cool swag.  Please don’t hesitate to take the opportunity to come down and check out what we’ve done to the place.

DIY walkie talkie network?

Maybe deserves a Hack Contest?

Remember all of those awesome new fangled mobile phones that you had to pay hundreds of dollars for? The games alone on these things were mind blowing right? Am I remembering this correctly? Well, regardless of their former use they are certainly no longer useful for their original purpose. To be honest we’re really not sure what they might be used for so we thought it might be interesting to see what you, the reader, our public, might decide to use them for.  This month these fantastic little relics of the past will be on sale for $1.99, and everyone that buys one should post a pic of what they end up doing with it to our Facebook page or email to us down here at the shop.  The only rule is, “anything goes.”  All entries will be judged by an esteemed panel of judges, and the winner will receive a $50.00 gift certificate to the store! Contest starts today and will end on Earth Day, 4.22.11. Show us and the world what can be done with obsolete technology!

We have set out a bucket for donations here at the store to help aid our friends at the Tokyo Hackerspace in creating and distributing solar powered lamps and making a citizen run wifi infrastructure. If you would like to donate to a direct humanitarian cause, they are doing great things for their fellows and neighbors locally in Japan. You can read more about it here.  On top of the public the donations, we are also going to donate 10% of our sales this weekend to their cause.

We are also making a care package that we can send over. Akiba from the Tokyo Hackerspace has told me that any items such as small solar, dc-dc convertors and chargers would be most useful as power to the devastated areas of Japan won’t be rebuilt for some time now. Many of the items that our community donates for recycling to us are along the line of items that would be a great help. Akiba has also compiled a list of needed materials on his blog.  We would love to be able to help out with their efforts.

Ludlum Model 2A Survey Meter Geiger, Eberline HP 260 Probe

With all of the news surrounding radiation, our sales of geiger counters have become something more than a post-use novelty. We offer American made Ludlum Model 2A’s among others and will also be donating a portion of our geiger counter sales to Japanese hunger and medical relief. If you would like to purchase a geiger counter, please send us a message via Info@reuseum.com or you can check out our warehouse’s current listings via Obtainium.

Flame Assembly from a Spectrometer

You have never seen this in a store before. It’s use is pretty easy, input acetylene (or maybe another type of gas, but we aren’t suggesting anything) and you have the perfect desktop lamp for your steampunk ambitions. We won’t light it up, but will definitely watch you do it…at your house.  It’s one of a kind sort of item, so don’t hesitate to come down and snap it up to be the lucky person who gets to perform science with it.