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Adafruit Gemma stuffs a wearable Arduino platform into a one-inch disc
Adafruit's Flora wearable platform is barely a year old, yet it already has a little sibling on the way -- and we do mean little. The newer Gemma is Arduino-programmable over USB like its relative, but measures just over half the size of the Flora at an inch in diameter. It's even bordering on cute, as far as circuit boards go. Before developing any grand visions of wearable computers, though, be aware that Gemma's features scale down with its size: there's only three input/output pins, and a limited amount of memory won't let it handle more than about a dozen of Adafruit's NeoPixel lights. All the same, any aspiring tailor willing to trade flexibility for subtlety in a costume will likely want to sign up for notification of the Gemma's in-stock date at the source link.
DIY password dongle logs you in, saves you from RSI (video)
Any of you who have spent time in corporate America know that companies can be pretty paranoid about your passwords. Change them every three months, have a minimum of one upper case and one lower case letter, one number, one special character and be at least 12 characters long. We've even seen requirements for how many characters must be different from one password to the next. Joonas Pihlajamaa apparently got tired of trying to keep up and built himself a USB key, based around an ATtiny85, that automatically inputs a password for him when plugged into a computer and can even generate a new one with just a few key presses. You can see it in action after the break or hit up the source to learn how to build your own.
