NYC Resistor

Bruce Shapiro was recently featured in an short video by Cool Hunting. He’s a self taught hardware artist and has created some amazing projects exploring motion control, including the ‘egg plotter’, ‘3-axis router’ and ‘Pipedream I, II, and III’—which draws in bubbles. He works with motors, steel, eggs, bubbles (my personal favorite), sand and many more materials. Shapiro also teaches a 10 day class called ‘From Bits, To Bites, To Bots‘ at the Science Museum of Minnesota. Maybe next time he’s in NY we can ask him to do some demos for the NYC Resistor Group?
Check out some of his projects at The Art of Motion Control and the Cool Hunting Video.

Some pictures of The NYC Resistor meeting tonight.

Dave’s hardware for the audio oscilloscope.

We also had a great demo from Diana Eng of the blogginginmotion purse.

I couldn’t pass this post up. Virgin America is holding a special with Diggnation - buy one flight to anywhere they fly and get one free. You have to use the DIGGNATION promo code and you have to book by December 7th… but what a deal!

Here is another great console application that doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. This text based browser supports up to 256 colors (but due to the limitation of your console, it will most likely be 16 colors.) and displays web pages really well. In fact, on some non-large screen phones, I’d rather have this as my browser.

It also supports mouse clicks, which is great if you’re on a page with a large number of links. It even supports scrolling with the middle mouse wheel.

Some cool features that are rare in the console world are the ability to parse mild Java script, a download manager, and support for tables/frames.

It’s also extremely small and immune to shock sites. The browser’s most common use is to look up help information after an X server crash. I also use it a lot over ssh when I don’t want to download something locally and then upload it to my server. It is especially useful when the server requires authentication before getting the file.

Maybe not as useful as HTOP, but it’s still handy if your tired of white backgrounds that hurt your eyes. –Link

Best writeup ever.

LEDs are to hobby electronics what peppercorns are to cuisine: they can be sprinkled anywhere.

Read the whole article here. - Link

I recently had the opportunity to climb the mast at the new New York Times Headquarters. It’s a 120 foot climb above the 52nd floor of the new building. Check out the fun video, and special thanks to Bre Pettis for the great music. CLICK HERE TO SEE THE VIDEO.

I’m at the Metalab in Vienna and the guys here are working with a CNC Router to cut out Invaders! They’re using CamBam, which is an open source program for Windows. - Link

Update: after seeing it work, I’m impressed with the fact that this software takes into account the size of your tool, the only downside is that it’s kinda clunky. If you get it to work, take lots of screenshots to use as notes!

Learn how to use shift registers as Dave explains his LED oscilloscope project at NYC Resistor’s bi-weekly Microcontroller Study Group.

UPDATE:

We’ve all gotten excited about this project, and Dave has agreed to open up his code and document everything, but needs a little help creating the schematics, etc. Zach ‘Hoeken’ Smith of RepRap will be giving a demo on Eagle at the next NYCResistor Microcontroller Study Group meeting so we can create the schematic, and get started documenting this whole project from start to finish!

Soon after that, we’re looking to create a kit for this project to make it easy for people to duplicate it at home. It’s a great project for learning audio processing, breadboarding using arduino, shift registers, and how to make and use an LED matrix. That, and it’s just cool. I want one of these for my desk.

Looking for some good sensors for a project? Try the SensorWiki. It’s a great collection of different sensors. From Inclinometers, Rotary potentiometers, Force-sensitive resistors (FSR) and other kinds of ‘ometers’.