Radio silence on Neurons throughout most of summer. I still owe this project page a major update. Rather than wasting [too much] time with excuses, let's get started bringing everyone who may be interested up to speed.

That's us. NeuroTinker, LLC. Our site is a bit sparse right now, but we're slowly building up content and getting background information filled in. We hired my excellent cousin Lauren Everett to design our logo and put together a basic website framework; she did an excellent job (as you can see) and was terrific to work with.

So what's the plan? We want to develop an educational platform that gets people into neuroscience. We want it to be modular, economical, scientifically accurate, fun, open-source, and accessible to a broad range of educational achievement levels. While chemistry students pick up their ball-and-stick model kits from the campus bookstore, aspiring neuroscientists will get NeuroBytes.

How do we do that? We get NeuroBytes into the hands of lots of students as quickly as possible. We figure out how to use the platform to model real parts of the nervous system. We add new modules and sensors and outputs and try to build something exciting and engaging. We iterate a lot. I (by necessity) learn a lot more about microcontroller programming. We talk to educators and figure out what might improve the classroom experience.

As of today, we've heard back from a few dozen educators across a wide range of institutions who all seem quite stoked about the concept. We have applied for two SBIR Phase I grants focusing on different specific areas of educational technology (but we probably won't hear back for a few months). We sold six NeuroBytes v04 prototypes for integration into a Crazy Project (Crazy Project owner, feel free to comment if you wish). And we built more NeuroBytes:

and worked on some new NeuroBytes interfaces:

I'm hoping to have a firmware update pushed out in the next week or two; this revision will include the servo driver test code shown above along with a to-be-developed Motor NeuroBytes module setup.

Woo!