We’re getting excited for Maker Faire Bay Area 2012, coming up this Saturday and Sunday, May 19th and 20th! We’re pretty stoked to meet all you makers out there, so we’ve decided to give away 2 free one-day passes to one of our followers.

A prerequisite to attending Maker Faire is having your ear to the ground about all the activities you’ll be able to take part in. One way to do that is to check out our post last week, which shares some of the cool things you’ll find at the Digi/XBee booth. A sneak peak video of what to expect at our booth is coming soon.

To enter to win 2 free tickets to this weekend’s Maker Faire Bay Area 2012, simply send the tweet below: 

Free Maker Faire tickets from @XBeeWireless! http://www.idigi.com/blog/community/maker-faire-bay-area-give-away

That’s it, you’re entered!

The give-away will run from today, May 16, through 5pm PDT , Thursday, May 17—that’s tomorrow!

Participants that answer correctly in the format noted above, before 5pm PDT on May 17, will be entered to win 2 free one-day passes to Maker Faire Bay Area. The winner will be directly notified and announced here on the iDigi blog.

Only one will win, and you must be in the Bay area.

In less than 30 minutes, Digi International’s Director of Cloud Strategy, Cary Stronach, and John Powell, Digi Solutions Architect, demonstrate how.

Watch now

Kevin Kelly on the next 5,000 days of the web
At the 2007 EG conference, Kevin Kelly shares a fun stat: The World Wide Web, as we know it, is only 5,000 days old. Now, Kelly asks, how can we predict what’s coming in the next 5,000 days?

Kristina Höök – Living in an Internet of Things World
Kristina Höök is a Professor in Human-Machine Interaction at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences and an employee at SICS, the Swedish Institute of Computer Science. Kristina was a founder of the Mobile Life Centre. Her research focuses on bodily and emotional interaction. She will talk about “The Internet of Things” – uniquely identifiable objects virtually represented in an Internet-like structure. www.tedxkth.com TEDxKTH – ICT as a Game Changer

Vijay Kumar: Robots that fly … and cooperate
In his lab at Penn, Vijay Kumar and his team build flying quadrotors, small, agile robots that swarm, sense each other, and form ad hoc teams — for construction, surveying disasters and far more.

Tim Berners-Lee on the next Web
20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he’s building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together.

The is just the beginning of what we hope will be a growing list of TED videos, and meaningful Internet of Things conversations. Let us know if you would like to add a video to this list in the comments section or on Twitter.

Putting the Tech in Metrotech by Laura Kusisto on The Wall Street Journal

iCache Geode digital wallet hands-on [video] by Sean Cooper on Engadget

Clay Shirky on Creativity and Botanicalls originally posted by Rob Faludi

Digi’s XBee SumoBots (Troy and Abed) for Maker Faire

Not so much a project or article, but this photo of the parking lot where XBee is designed, taken by iDigi Product Manager Jordan Husney, is definitely a Friday Favorite. You can see Jordan’s original tweet or follow him on Twitter, @Jordan_Husney.

Do you have a link to share? Please tell us in the comments below or Tweet us, @DigiDotCom — we would love to share your findings too.

Say hello to Troy and Abed! They’re Digi International’s brand-new XBee-enabled SumoBots and they’re ready to begin training for their debut at Bay Area Maker Faire 2012. They’ll be battling it out in the Digi booth May 19th and 20th, so prepare yourself for a wireless robotic sumo showdown! Here’s a first look:

Thanks to Andy Lindsay at Parallax for designs and code!

NYC Resistor - “We Learn, Share, and Make things.”

NYC Resistor is a hacker collective with a shared space located in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. The group meets regularly to share knowledge, hack on projects together and build community. They offer hardware and programming classes and allow people to collectively work on innovative open source hardware and robotics projects.

Follow NYC Resistor on Twitter

Follow the Founding Members

Bre Pettis – Instigator with video trigger finger
Bre is a founder of NYCResister and Makerbot, a company that produces robots that make things. Besides being a TV host and Video Podcast producer, he’s created new media for Etsy.com, hosted Make: Magazine’s Weekend Projects podcast, and has been a schoolteacher, artist, and puppeteer. Bre is passionate about invention, innovation and all things DIY.

George Shammas – Breaks things to fix them

Zach Smith – Rapid-prototyper and self-replicater

Eric Skiff – Gameboy musician and crowd control
Eric Skiff is one of the Hackers at QLabs, and a Drop.io alum. He’s also a co-founder of NYC Resistor, and he co-organizes BarCamps in NYC. He loves how the Internet has transformed our lives and that it’s turning us all into producers instead of consumers.

Nick Bilton – Hardware and Frontend/CSS Ninja
Nick Bilton, who also helped co-found NYCResistor, is a New York Times technology columnist and lead blogger for The New York Times Bits Blog. Nick’s the author of I Live in the Future: & Here’s How It Works. He is currently the Design Integration Editor for The New York Times and the User Interface Specialist & Researcher for The New York Times Research & Development Lab. He is an Adjunct Professor at NYU / ITP teaching a class called 1, 2, 10, & ‘Sensors As Reporters’.

Dave Clausen – Micro-hacker and structural engineer

Raphael Abrams – Artist and keeper of the servos

Diana Eng - Softronics
Educated at RISD in apparel design, Diana Eng started her career as a designer on Bravo’s Project Runway, Season 2. In ’09, Eng received a grant from Rhizome and an artist residency from Eyebeam Art and Technology Center to create fashion prototypes using laser cutters, 3-d printers, and electronics for her educational program FairytaleFashion.org. Diana started her ready-to-wear line Diana Eng in 2010, and continues working to bring new innovation in fashion to market. Diana leads softronics at NYC Resistor.

Pat Gallagher – RPRT

In the New York City area?
NYC Resistor offers fun and interesting classes. They also do unique things like the Microcontroller Study Group, a Web Dev Study Group, craft night and “lunar lazzzor” night.

Membership to the NYC Resistor core group is invite-only. If you’re interested in joining, they encourage you to stop by and get to know members at one of the many public events.

Do you work at NYC Resistor? Want to be added to this list? Let us know in the comments section or on Twitter.

Projects

Beating Heart Headband
The Beating Heart Headband uses a heartrate sensor and perfboard Arduino to flash a heart-shaped LED display to the rhythm of your heart.

Google’s Project Glass and Oakley Glasses
Google and Oakley are creating technology that can project information directly onto lenses– an experimental effort to build smartphone features into eyewear.

The Intelligent Cycling Jacket
Combining intelligent materials like water resistant, breathable organic cotton and flexible LED circuits, Sporty Supaheroe is an intelligent cycling jacket that promises to keep cyclists both safe and comfortable on the road.

Will.i.am Video Jacket
During the latest Black Eyed Peas tour, singer Will.I.Am sported a hand tailored jacket made by Hardy Amis’ master taylor Jan Cicmanec and completely covered in an LED video system. The jacket is capable of displaying animations at video speed from a built in SD card.

You can see more wearable tech projects including Adidas Megalizer, Proximity-Sensing Pocket Squares and Party in the Mouth on the XBee Project Gallery.

People

LadyAda (Limor Fried) of Adafruit Industries
LadyAda.net
Adafruit
Adafruit on Twitter
Limor Fried, Founder of Adafruit Industries, is a MIT trained engineer. She is the first female engineer on WIRED magazine’s cover, named one of the “Most influential Women in Technology” by Fast Company and the winner of an EFF pioneer award for teaching and sharing electronics.

She has been featured in hundreds of publications and media around the world. Adafruit was started in 2005, Limor’s goal is to create the best place online for learning electronics and making the best designed products for makers of all ages and skill levels. Since then, Adafruit has grown to over 25 employees in the heart of NYC.

Syuzi Pakhchyan
FashioningTech.com
Syuzi Pakhchyan on Twitter
Syuzi Pakhchyan is a fashion technologist with a fetish for beautiful code and conductive cloth. She’s an experience designer whose work investigates the intersection between code, cloth and culture. Her design and research interests include wearable technologies, physical and soft computing, and interactive textile design. Her book “Fashioning Technology: A DIY Intro to Smart Crafting“ explores the emerging creative practice of soft circuits and soft technologies.

Steve Mann
Steven Mann, the author of Wearable Computing, is a professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto. Mann holds degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and McMaster University, where he was also inducted into the McMaster University Alumni Hall of Fame, Alumni Gallery, 2004, in recognition of his career as an inventor and teacher. While at MIT he was one of the founding members of the Wearable Computers group in the Media Lab.

Diana Eng
DianaEng.com
Diana Eng  Twitter
Educated at RISD in apparel design, Diana Eng started her career as a designer on Bravo’s Project Runway, Season 2. Diana worked as an assistant designer at Generra but left the company to pursue a career working with more experimental fashion. She found her niche in Victoria’s Secret research and development department. The department created new innovation for mass market.

In 2009, Eng received a grant from Rhizome and an artist residency from Eyebeam Art and Technology Center to create fashion prototypes using laser cutters, 3-d printers, and electronics for her educational program FairytaleFashion.org. Diana started her ready-to-wear line Diana Eng in 2010, and continues working to bring new innovation in fashion to market.

Love wearable tech? Follow our Wearable Tech board on Pinterest.

Know someone or something that should be on this list? Let us know in the comments section or on Twitter.

Gas Cap by QTechKnow (Quin, our favorite 11 year old Maker)

You can probably guess what the “Gas Cap” does, but did you guess that it was made by an 11 year old? Probably not. Caleb combined a methane sensor with an LED bar graph and XBee to create the Gas Cap.

Read On

The Fiber Optic Chandelier by Apex Logic

Instead of paying over $1000 for a chandelier on Ebay, the folks at Apex Logic made their own– with more features, of course. The fiber optic chandelier is made with with ATMega328 and XBee, giving it wireless control and RGB color selection.

Read On and Watch the Video

Party in the Mouth by Daito Manabe, Motoi Ishibashi and Tomoaki Yanagisawa

In Japan, these designers came up with fashionable multicolored glowing LED accessories for your teeth, created for an advertising campaign.

Read On and Watch the Video

We’ll be featuring the XBee Project Gallery at Maker Faire on May 19 and 20. So, get your project added now and make sure to stop by and see us in the Bay Area.

Have a project you’d like to be featured? Let us know in the comments below or Tweet us at @XBeeWireless. We also tweet about projects and XBee news and updates every day, follow us to see the latest and greatest!

Join us on Tuesday, May 15 from 10-11AM CDT for “Simplifying Device Network Management
– Overcoming the challenges of managing a large, dynamic device network” to discuss challenges and solutions for your growing network.

We will identify tools and techniques to make device network control more manageable, efficient and transparent— and reveal how operations that have previously taken hours, days, weeks, even months to complete, could now be executed in a matter of minutes.

The Webinar will be a forum to discuss:

• The evolution of device network management over recent years
• The challenges facing management of large device networks
• How you can manage a growing device network with very large populations of devices with greatly increased efficiency
• iDigi® Manager Pro™ and its suite of device network management tools
• The endless range of devices and applications that can be integrated into the cloud and see examples of how device network management solutions can be applied to different verticals

Digi brings more than 25 years of experience and expertise in the device connectivity space. Our commitment to and passion for the continuing evolution of the Internet of Things places us at the forefront of this exciting industry and we look forward to sharing our knowledge to help break down the barriers to effective device network management.

Register today or let us know if you have questions in the comments section below.

Register Now

12,000-Mile Universal Remote by Jordan Husney in Make: Vol. 30, Smarter Homes

Top 50 Sensor Applications for a Smarter World on Libelium

XBee “Gas Cap” by QTechKnow (our favorite 11 year old Maker) on Instructables

Fiber Optic Chandelier Prototype with ATMega328 and XBee on Adafruit and the XBee Project Gallery

Harvard Releases Big Data for Books by Quentin Hardy on the New York Times Bits Blog

Arduino + Xbee + PS2 controller = 20 channel universal project controller on Adafruit

Do you have a link to share? Please tell us in the comments below or Tweet us, @DigiDotCom — we would love to share your findings too.