You've never seen a group of programmers and designers flip out over someone like they did over Peter Semmelhack, CEO of open-source gadget company Bug Labs, at SXSW this morning. (That is, unless you were at Jonathan Coulton's show at the PopSci.com party last night. Grown men pulling their thinning hair and jumping up and down, that sort of thing. But Semmelhack's crowd came close, and they were sober.)

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As entries continue to roll in for our Build-a-BUG challenge, we're excited to announce that you've got a little extra time to polish that first- or second-prize entry. We'll now accept entries for both prize levels until April 1, 2008.

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We’re excited to announce that we’re launching a special PopSci.com contest with Bug Labs, the folks behind BUG, the open, modular consumer-electronics hardware and Web-services platform that you can use like Legos to build practically any gadget you can dream up. And even more exciting, the grand prize will be a BUGbase and the first batch of four BUGmodules!

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If you've already gotten your hands on our hot-off-the-presses January issue, you may have seen our announcement of a contest with BUG Labs—makers of the modular open-source hardware kit that allows handy builders to create the gadget of their dreams by snapping one of several available modules to a central BUGbase portable computer, which can then be programmed to get all the modules talking to each other in all kinds of interesting ways. Sounds pretty cool, right?

Along with the BUG folks, we're putting the finishing touches on the contest now—it's going to be great!. So watch this space for details in the next few days. DIY gadget heads, prepare yourselves.  —John Mahoney

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Pop Sci scores a look at the brand-new open-source hardware platform

Creating new software has low overhead: All you need is a keyboard and patience. Heck, you can even grab hunks of ready-made code from open-source libraries.

But creating hardware is a lot, um, harder. At best, it’s a tedious process of soldering parts together. But often it’s plain impossible. Sharp may have a great miniature LCD panel you want to use. And they’ll be happy to sell it to you, as long as you buy 999,999 others along with it.

Bug Labs is tying to make hardware hacking nearly as easy as code mashing with its Bug platform: A series of components that snap together like Legos to form new gadgets. They announced their plans months ago and have shown renderings of the components, but today they took the wraps off the actual pieces. We saw them, and took pictures, a few weeks ago while working on an article for our upcoming January issue.

Key impression: The stuff is really small. Initially, I’d pictured a large, unwieldy, Rube-Goldbergian contraption. But this stuff is svelte. The Bug Base – a Linux computer that forms the heart of any gadget (top left in this photo) -- is a trim 5 x 2.5 x 0.6 inches. Not quite as small as an iPhone, but not much bigger. And the modules are a tiny 2.5 inches square by a quarter inch thick.

Four modules (enough to fill every socket on the base) will be available when the product debuts before the end of the year: A GPS receiver -- next to the base in the photo above -- and, from bottom left to right, -- a motion sensor, a touch-sensitive LCD screen and a camera. Bug labs hopes to release four new modules per season -- if they can score the parts.

Peter Semmelhack, Bug’s founder, said that it’s very difficult to get component makers to sell them parts in smaller-than-typical quantities (a few hundred or thousand vs. hundreds of thousands). To get a mini LCD panel, for example, he had to convince the maker to buy into the overall idea of Bug Labs and do the sale out of the goodness of its corporate heart.

The struggle continues. Wi-Fi is supposed to be included in the Bug Base, but as of a few weeks ago, Semmelhack was still looking for a supplier.

One possible future piece will be easy for Bug to put together -- the Von Hippel module. It’s named for MIT professor Eric von Hippel, who advocates the theory of “user innovation” -- that end-users influence product innovation at least as much as manufacturers. His namesake module will contain just an empty circuit board, to which hackers can attach whatever they want.—Sean Captain

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The TV-B-Gone, a small device that can turn off all TVs within 100 feet—perfect for terrorizing your neighbors or local sports bar patrons—made a lot of headlines when it debuted last year. Now open-source hardware queen Limor Fried has a kit that lets you build one yourself. We've used Fried's kits before—to make a small POV device—and found them to be excellently documented and a great intro to soldering and building basic electronics. We'll be ordering one to build here in the office—and I have a feeling the lunch room Days of Our Lives viewing is about to get a little more unpredictable.

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