This September I had the pleasure of attending the World Maker Faire in New York. Along with a variety of other wonders and interesting people, I was able to talk with Eduardo Contreras, Chief Design Officer of Electronic Cats.
Electronic Cats Members (left to right): Eduardo Contreras, Ignacio Acosta, Felipe Valero, Rocio Rodriguez, and Andres Sabas. Eduardo claims he is not laughing at the other guys’ puny high-altitude balloons!
Electronics Cats, in addition to selling on Tindie, are heavily involved in sending balloons high into the atmosphere for experimental readings and imaging as part of the CatSat 1 program. As such, they have been involved in over 50 high-altitude missions in Latin America, and offer a kit to help get started with this pursuit.
CatSat 1 module includes most everything you’ll need for high-altitude balloon launches.
Their other offerings on Tindie involve LoRaWAN communication, an integral part of the CatSat. This technology, which is able to transmit data at a range of around 50km, is perfect for small balloon-satellites, where relaying simple GPS coordinates and other data at long ranges is more important than bandwidth. This tech is useful well beyond near-earth satellites, as explained in Eduardo’s introductory talk on this subject at WMFNY this year.
Eduardo talks LoRaWAN at Maker Faire
Electronic Cats is based in Mexico, and their goal is to demonstrate the possibility of creating cool and fun open hardware in Latin America with good support and documentation. In fact, they feature the largest collection of Spanish language documentation for picosatellite missions. Eventually they hope to expand to making maker products on a larger scale, similar to companies like Sparkfun and Adafruit.
Currently, 3 engineers work for Electronic Cats full-time, while another 6 are involved on a part-time basis. One of their latest endeavors is called the Meow Meow board, which allows you to hook up everyday objects as inputs, uses capacitive sensing and a powerful SAMD21 microcontroller. Right now they’re pre-selling units on their own site. When the kinks are worked out and they enter production, we hope they’ll decide to list them on Tindie!
Meow Meow: Not on Tindie, but perhaps soon?
Eduardo sees some of the great aspects of Tindie as being able to promote projects through our social networks in conjunction with Hackaday. He also enjoys our nice interface, and the fraud protection offered as part of the Tindie guarantee. On their wishlist for Tindie store features, pre-selling products (as they’re currently doing on their own site with Meow Meow) would be useful to Electronic Cats, as would the option for multiple users and collaborators to work as an organization. It’s an interesting idea, as Tindie tends to be geared towards single-person operations. There are, however, several small multi-person organizations selling here that could likely benefit from a multi-user interface.
All that being said, the real question that you probably have about “Electronic Cats” is why the nombre del gato? When I asked him about this at WMFNY, Eduardo noted that the Internet was invented by cats and for cats, thus the reason for so many cat videos. Given this revelation, it only makes sense to name the company Electronic Cats, and it would follow that the Internet’s cat overlords would push such a company forward toward success. Tindie, our canine mascot, would likely disagree, however we welcome all species to sell on this platform, electronic or carbon-based!
