Video of Project Ara Demo from Google I/O

Maple & Maple Mini Designs Now Available on Upverter!

Upverter: "We're on a mission to make hardware less hard; to empower engineers by equipping them with world-class technology, knowledge, and support.

We are making every step of hardware design approachable, pleasant, and productive.

We believe the tools should fade into the background, freeing engineers to be truly creative."

And now, Maple and Maple Mini designs are available on Upverter! Easily bake stm32 and libmaple into your next project. You can find the interactive designs at the following link:  https://upverter.com/LeafLabs/ (both the Maple and the Maple Mini).

New Home!

New home!

New home!

With the arrival of our new team members Mitch and Nick back in January our space was starting to feel a little snug.  After some lightning fast moving and renovations we find ourselves still in our beloved Industry Lab just on a different floor with lots of room for us to grow!  Some pictures of the move and our new space.

Mid move...

Mid move...

Maple End-of-Life Notice

The time has come for LeafLabs to officially end-of-life the Maple product line. We know this will come as disappointing news for many of you, but the STM32 market these days is full of other options for the intrepid developer, and we can’t justify the resources necessary to support Maple in the way it and the community deserve.

As always, the design files for Maple and Maple Mini will remain available on GitHub, under a CC-BY-SA 2.0 license, for anyone who wants to recreate or reimagine these boards. libmaple will also stay on GitHub, and we will continue to take community patches. We will continue hosting the forums and the docs as well.

We here at LeafLabs sincerely appreciate all the time, effort, enthusiasm, and creativity you guys have contributed to Maple over the past five years. It’s been a great run, folks.

Keep on hacking.

LeafLabs at the Society for Neuroscience

LeafLabs recently exhibited the Willow System at the Society for Neuroscience's Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.  Our collaborators at the Ed Boyden Lab were there as well with the following posters: 

Boyden, E.S. : 655.19-Tu & 659.03-Tu

Kinney, J.P. : 659.05-Tu

Moore-Kochlacs: 659.05-Tu

Scholvin, J.S. : 659.03-Tu, 659.05-Tu  

Also at SFN were our friends at Intan and Kendall Research Systems.  Research for Willow is supported by the National Institute of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R43MH101943. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. 

Jess and Andrew at the LeafLabs booth

Jess and Andrew at the LeafLabs booth

Willow traveling cases

Willow traveling cases

hris assembling Willow

hris assembling Willow

he Willow System (probes in cases)

he Willow System (probes in cases)

Jess + Oculus Rift

Jess + Oculus Rift

Cool Tool: RunSnakeRun

One of my favorite python development tools is RunSnakeRun, which is a GUI for visualizing profiling information. I usually use it to track down what's making a script run slow: the tool draws nexted blocks with a surface area roughly proportional to the time spent in a given function. In the above screenshot I learned that the python library for Google'sProtocol Buffers serialization format were the bottle neck for an experiment we were doing. We were sort of expecting networking or disk I/O to be the bottleneck, but with these libraries it was the CPU. The compiled C libraries are much faster!

The Python interpreter actually has the profiling code built in ("cProfile"), and runsnakerun is just a GUI for analysing the dump files. The commands I usually use to capture a dump and then visualize with runsnakerun are something like:

$ python -m cProfile -o ./dump.profile myscript.py --script-option blah
$ # run to completion or Ctrl-C, then
$ runsnakerun ./dump.profile

You can get install runsnakerun from the debian package repos (probably ubuntu also); details and installation instructions for other operating systems are avalable from the website.