Welcome New Members!

Hi there New Members and welcome to the Blinks Discourse!

My name is Justin and I manage the Blinks and Move38 communities! We’re so excited you’re here and can’t wait to see what you build! If you ever have any questions (or suggestions) please don’t hesitate to post or reach out directly!

Since you’re here, why not take a moment and reply to this post and introduce yourself to the other members by telling us a little about yourself! I’ll start!

I live in Los Angeles (Glendale to be exact) with my wife and daughter. When not working with Move38 I enjoy long distance cycling and reading crime and thriller novels. (Shout out to my fellow Jack Reacher fans!) I’m always around here, so don’t hesitate to ping me and I can also be found on Twitter at twitter.com/builtbyjustin.

What’s your story? Can’t wait to hear it!

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Hi – my name is Kem, and I’m a software developer / gamer / father (not necessarily in that order :wink: I’m originally from Utah, but living in New Zealand now, raising my kids here with my Kiwi wife.

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Welcome Kem! Excited to see another DGF in the house!

Hi! My name is Justin and I’m a Game Design major at NYU who is interning at Move38 this summer testing and creating games for Blinks. As I’m discovering more about Blinks’ tech, I’ll make some posts about how to get around common problems or show some useful tools/code.

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Hi! My name is Jonathan Bobrow, I am a designer, developer, maker, math lover… and Blinks are one of my creations. I’m so excited to be on this forum, as I will be keeping an eye out for your posts, sharing my own explorations and progress, and looking for all of the amazing things that the community comes up with for Blinks that I never would have thought of in a million years.

Oooh, how about something you didn’t already know about me.

  1. I played baseball for ~24 years (SS, 2B, P, 1B) :baseball:
  2. At the age of 12, I was in the top 20 Table Tennis players in the US :ping_pong:
  3. I once won an real guitar for fake playing a guitar on stage at a Disney premiere :guitar:
  4. I live with my amazing life-partner, Jamie, in Sunnyside, NY. She is a dentist and secretly a super talented ceramicist help me convince her to change careers! :slight_smile:
  5. I am a new father to a 3 legged rescue from Nepal named Ernie :dog2:

Alright, I think that is a good start. Hit me up, I am curious to learn about you and share more about me as well :smiley:

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Hello! I’m quite a bit late to this party, I only JUST found out about these forums through the most recent email update…

My name is Jonathan, I’m a full-time automation engineer but a hobbyist game designer in my free time. I’ve only been at it for a little more than a year, but you can see some of my projects at my portfolio site here.

I’ve been really curious about where technology can take the design games and playful experiences, and Blinks seemed like the perfect platform to experiment and study that. Haven’t received my dev kit yet, but I’ve got a few ideas written down that I’m really excited to try out.

Looking forward to seeing everyone else’s creations!

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Welcome Jonathan! :wave: from Shanghai :smile: looking forward to getting your Dev-Kit into your hands, I enjoyed poking around your portfolio! btw, are you familiar with IndieCade? I sadly won’t be able to make this years in LA, but would love to see if Blinks Devs would want to gather that weekend and meet at IndieCade

Yes, I actually got the chance to volunteer at IndieCade last year! I was hoping to attend this year to spend a bit more time playing the exhibited games, but I’m on a bit of a tight budget and can’t afford passes. It would be cool to get some kind of meet and greet going for Blinks Devs though!

EDIT: Also, thanks for checking out my portfolio!

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Hello everyone,
I’m Caleb. Just got my Dev Kit yesterday, and already I’m impressed at how easy it’s been to set things up. I was expecting a lot more tweaking.

I’m not much of a designer (yet), but I like modifying tech things and I like board games, so I thought these would be great to try out at various board game meetups in the Portland, OR area. Already they’ve been a big hit at the one I went to tonight (we played Fracture). I’m going to need to get more when possible! And who knows, I may yet come up with a new game myself someday.

If I had only one small criticism, I wish the magnets were a bit stronger because sometimes things don’t line up quite right and a signal is missed. Still, on the whole very impressive. Looking forward to seeing what you all do!

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Hi @Qeyleb!

Welcome!! Looking forward to having you join the community and I have no doubt you’ll be designing your own games in no time. We’ll be posting some inspirational challenges to get the creative juices flowing :slight_smile:

On the note of the magnets, you are spot on. The alpha dev kits have magnets that are too strong (>300gf for Blink separation) and the beta Dev kits are too weak (100gf). The commercial Blinks should be ~150gf, something that will be fine tuned with the magnets and the distance between them.

Keep us posted on how game nights go!

Best,
jb

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Hey there. I’m a creative technologist working at a digital agency in San Francisco. Very interested in toys, games and microcontrollers. I attended the ITP program at NYU which was my first contact with Arduinos and all that.

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Welcome @gpvillamil,

I always love meeting ITP alum, there is a great culture there and it seems to stick around long after students have left the building :slight_smile:

Hey Everyone! I’m a freelance/contract software developer, focused on VR and Video Game development. I started my game studio Abstract Puzzle about 6.5 years ago, when I switched to contract development, and before that I was doing iOS development by day and generally making my own games on nights and weekends. Lately most of my contract work has been in Unity, (lots of VR & 360 video stuff, but I did work on a game released in October for Nintendo Switch, called Joggernauts). I also have a board game that’s been picked up by a publisher, and should come out next year sometime.

A couple of years ago, I made a few games for the L3D, which wasn’t really a game platform, but that’s about the extent of my arduino experience. I have A LOT of game ideas… I try to write in my game idea journal at least once a day. So I already know what I want to make first for blinks. I spent this morning getting the latest sdk installed, and ready to start coding. You can find out more about me and games I’ve worked on at my blog: chesstris.com/about/

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@martin Welcome! Excited to see what is first on the list, looking forward to this community play testing each others games :metal:

also, now I want to get my hands on a Switch to play some Joggernauts, I like how “switch” is the mechanism for the game… I’m waiting for a Blinks game that involves eyes being closed for brief periods of time :slight_smile:

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Hi!

I’m Jason. I’m a software engineer in Boston. I’ve done all kinds of development, but recently it has been mostly full stack and back end web development. And I have worked for 5 game companies in my career.

I’ve had my dev kit for a while now, but have not had the bandwidth to even get up to speed yet. I would love tips to get up and running. I’ll be looking at the QuickStart and tutorials.

I’m not entirely sure what I want to get out of this experience, but I would like to introduce Blinks to my nieces and nephews to both play games with them, but maybe to introduce them to programming too.

Nice to meet you all
~Jason

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Welcome Jason!!

Be sure to ping if you have any questions along the way :grinning:

Hi There.

I’m Francois a dad of 3 and software engineer in San Francisco.

Working on c#/.NET WinForms application but I have some experience with java from a previous job.
About 20 years ago i was working on writing the java library in assembly language for a virtual processor. I also have some experience with arduino (i made an mp3 player that played songs based on which rfid card was placed on it (card has an id, match the id to the filename to play) using an rfid reader and an mp3/sd reader shield.

I just got news that the blinks would ship soon, and am wondering whether i should get the dev kit or just get an AVR from BangGood or ebay.
I have not had time to check how the blinks are connected; is there a cad file somewhere i can 3d print a docking port ?

Looking forward to try the blinks and find some ideas for games.

-Francois

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Welcome @francois!

You have quite the technical history, looking forward to having you join the dev community. You inspired a new topic, surely others can add to it as well, but thought I would reference it here:

Hi!
I’m really late to the party, but I just discovered Blinks and I’m super into it.

I see that I can still pre-order Blinks from backerkit.
Looking at the kickstarter, I saw the previously sent dev kits were 3D printed prototypes?
If I order the dev kit now, would it ship with the final production hardware or prototype hardware?

Thanks,
Ray

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My name is Justin and I just discovered Blinks while roaming around PAX Unplugged. It was definitely the most exciting thing at the convention to me, and I had a blast playing the games and meeting members of move38. I’ll wait with extreme anticipation for my set+devkit to come in the mail when you start shipping again. After I figure out the system, my goal is to make a larger game that works well with 18 blinks!

I live outside of Philadelphia with my wife and we love playing games and rock climbing together and with our friends.

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