Mars, Makerbot & Power Outages - Reprobate Replicator Replication

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• The curiosity has landed! And the crowd goes wild!
• The electronics onboard are quite rugged, but kinda pokey.
• They wrote more than 2.5 million lines of C, 500,000 just for the landing!
• Does this mean more kids will learn C? Chris is dismayed his alma mater is teaching LabView as "programming" (though it's good for other stuff!)
• Maybe if Curiosity had crashed due to unit conversion again, they would finally push metric in the US? (Thanks to Randal Monroe...for everything he's ever done)
• Chris is sorry for the mess with the servers. It should be fixed now.
• Dave did a new video about "The Unwritten Rules of Open Source Hardware" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOUaoLjrNPo
• The video was kicked off by the Tangibot project on Kickstarter, a clone of the MakerBot (pictured, top)
• Akiba of Freaklabs wrote an interesting piece about this as well.
• Dave and Chris might take the "paid commenting" model public. A new Kickstarter project!
• Chris has backed the 99 percent invisible podcast (a great podcast about design and architecture), which raised $170K on Kickstarter.
• The top 10 chips for power aren't all names you'd expect. High volume parts aren't always accessible to small run electronics.
• The India Blackout may have been caused by an upgrade, in addition to the usual stealing of power.
• There will be a lot more growth in the power sector in coming years. IEEE Spectrum says that's where the jobs are (or will be).
• Chris learned that to do isolated power, you don't need a flyback per se. You can use a regular buck controller/converter, a transformer and an isolator.
• Sick of Kickstarter yet? Too bad! Go check out this rideable hexapod robot. The bumper sticker is awesome.