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Any chance those Xbee adapter boards are open source as well? I'd love to see the schematics and gerbers for those.

Hi,

The XBee dev board is a part of Funnel toolkit. More information about the toolkit is available at:

http://funnel.cc

Of course, the dev board IS open sourced. I'll release a new build including the board design soon. ;)

Thanks,
Shigeru

Gainer looks suspiciously like an Arduino to me :)

Hi Shadyman,

Yes, Gainer is yet another physical computing toolkit similar to Arduino, and Gainer I/O module is designed to be a very simple I/O module (i.e. doesn't work in standalone mode).

I'm also working for a new toolkit "Funnel," a little bit higher level software libraries for Arduino, Gainer, XBee and Funnel I/O.

Thanks,
Shigeru

I just got my gainer from Sparkfun last week. I've been putting together my first gainer based project and I think it's a solid design. It's actually a nice alternative to arduino if you plan to do all of the processing on the PC side.

Unfortunately, the cost is still a bit high. You can get a barebones arduino for cheaper and have processing power on-board, or pickup a USB interface board (http://www.elexp.com/tst_bkit.htm) for the roughly the same price and use real USB instead serial.

Still, I like the gainer. I hope the project grows and continues to gain more support in the english forums.

For those not aware of what Gainer is (it has shown up on the MAKE Blog before!) it's basically a general purpose programmable controller module similar to Arduino etc. Gainer can be controlled and programmed from a variety of environments, most very media oriented (Flash, Processing, Max/MSP, etc.). From what I have seen it's primarily been used in interactive art and various automated/interactive "objects". Gainer hits a different niche than other controllers because of it's somewhat strict media orientation and the fact that the primary programming environments for it are super visual. In short it's a controller for people who want to work with everything as visually as possible, such as artists and designers.

At the end of the day, gainer communicates over serial, using the FTDI chip. So even though Flash, Processing, and Max/MSP are the officially supported languages, any language capable of opening a serial connection can make use of the gainer (provided you want to write your own library).

Tim

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