I am Eric Ely, the creator of Bluz. Ask Me Anything

Bluz is the Bluetooth LE powered Spark development board, currently running on Kickstarter

Bluz is the first Spark Compound, a combination of Spark tools and outside development. Read more here:

And… Go!

Will you be at the 2015 Bay Area Maker Faire?

How did you first get introduced to Spark and what prompted you to join the community?

Yes, Spark has been kind enough to invite me to come to their booth. We will be closing out the Kickstarter campaign the Monday after, so we will have some awesome giveaways and cool demos to show off that weekend.

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Would you rather fight one horse sized duck or 100 duck sized horses?

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I’ve asked this every AMA so far, you’re no exception!

Say Shia LeBeouf is hunting you like an animal in the forest. He is faster than you, stronger than you, and in his native habitat. You are smarter than him though. How do you escape Shia LeBeouf???

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Just happened upon the project during the Core Kickstarter campaign. Thought it was cool at the time, but didn't really get too involved until last summer when we were trying to mock-up a Wifi remote for GoGlove. I used Spark to do it and then got very interested in putting together Bluetooth LE, which GoGlove runs on, and Spark. So, I jumped on and started this thread:

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Is it pronounced “blooz” or “bluhz”?

How did you learn how to do this stuff? (by this stuff I mean programming and designing hardware)

GoGlove is awesome, do you prefer skiing or snowboarding? Where’s your favorite snow?

How hard will be it for me to interface to my {Pebble, Fitbit, Wii Balance Board, iPhone, Tile, StickNFind, etc} from Bluz?

In essence, is Bluz designed to talk to existing consumer BLE devices or just talk amongst themselves and to other BLE hobbyist devices?

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Is it sad that I actually tried to prepare for this question?

I would just throw this paper bad on his head:

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Blues, like Blues Brothers.

We originally had an 'e' at the end, so "bluze". We made the logo and everything and then realized there was another product out there with the same name that we didn't want to be associated with (I'll let the interested student google it). So we dropped the 'e' and it has been confusing ever since.

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Are there any plans to work with other Spark-powered products like the L3D Cube, CleverPet, etc. to give them Bluetooth capabilities?

I have a degree in computer science, and to date myself, I have been working as a software engineer for nearly 10 years now. So the software stuff I have been doing for a long time

At one point in my career, I had to start learning hardware for work. So basic PCB design, arduino shields for custom projects, etc. Then I got really into it from a personal standpoint too. It has just been a learning experience over the last 5 years or so, and I still feel I have so much to learn there.

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I'm definitely a skier. I tried snowboarding a few times, not for me.

I'm a New Englander, so I spend a lot of time up here. When I do venture out west, it is usually to Utah, my family as a timeshare there. Love it too. Can't wait for them to link Canyons and Park City this year!

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We are gearing it both ways. So we are going to add a lot of wrappers around the Nordic SDK, so you can add custom profiles (like HID over GATT, which is how GoGlove runs) on top of all the Spark Cloud stuff. So you get the default Spark Cloud stuff and can then easily build more on top

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Definitely the horse sized duck. Then I can capture it and train it as a pet and ride it to work.

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