NYC Resistor

Zombie Pumpkin has just hacked this post to remind you that Resistor’s Halloween Gigante Party Super-Especial is Friday October 31st, from 9 p.m. onwards. Come in costume, or one will be assigned to you. Possibly me.

$10 cover includes lots of delicious beer!

Ready to do the (seemingly) impossible? Of course you are! Take the “Joule Thievery” class here at NYCR. From the class description:

“A Joule Thief is a simple electronic circuit that can extract useful work out of a very feeble power source. It can be used to extend the life of batteries, gather power from a dimly lit solar cells or a tiny windmill. It’s a fascinating device, and is very easy to build. You will learn about transistors, inductors, diodes, LEDs and more! This is a great introductory course for absolute beginners.”

Click here to sign up.

$25, taught by Raphael Abrams

Ages 12 and up wlecome!

Ever wanted to grow grass in your cubicle? I did. But the grass kept dying. So I made a custom grow light out of LEDs, and now I have the nicest lawn on my block. Build photos, schematic, sourcecode, etc. are on the project page.

When we got the Lazor at NYCR, Adam discovered that Moleskin’s have PVC (not good) in the leather and lazering such a thing could be harmful to your health and might even harm small puppies! (Gasp!)

I wanted to Lazer the NYTimes “T” into my notebook so I had to take an alternate route. Very simply, I just cut out a “T” on the Epilog Lazor and then pressed it in a vice between a couple of pieces of wood for 20 mins or so. Looks pretty neat if I may say so myself. “Fire the lazzzzor!”

I found Matt Shlian’s work while surfing Youtube. I’m a big fan of paper engineering and after seeing the way he makes paper move, I had to know more! - Link

Make:NYC Meeting 9 happened yesterday at NYCR. I’m still compiling a more robust breakdown of the event, but I thought I’d toss out a sneak peak…

And as always… big thanks to all the resistors for putting up with us!

Another Tuesday Night meeting, just after bloody MAKE:NYC gore and just before the phooky phenom on twitter.

Marc de Vink posted a nice video demoing the Danger Shield I created over at MAKE Blog. This little board was designed for teaching people how to program for the Arduino and if you sign up for classes, I’ll teach you how to program an Arduino using one of these little guys.

Here at Resistor, other people’s technology cast-offs show up on our shelves.  Occasionally we take one down and give it a good thrashing to see whether or not it’s useful.  This time, we have an animation controller manufactured by the strange little company “Gilderfluke” that specializes in robotics controls for the sort of thing you might see at a kid-themed pizza restaurant.  Given that they have an Orlando office, they probably also do business with the big D.

The Gilderfluke device is a heavy I/O, heavy serial process logic controller.  It has facilities for time synchronization between devices, and the company sells add ons to facilitate passing audio over long distances without losing sync as well as driving DMX-equipped theatrical devices.  It’s clearly overkill for Resistor, but only in the sense that we aren’t planning to build a theme park, because otherwise we *love* overkill.  Why use a class 2 laser when you have a perfectly good class 4 available?

This PLC is interesting both because it is a new rabbit hole of neatness, but more importantly because it has lots of LEDs.  Although we are in the age of the organic LED display, where rich text and video can be placed on near about anything - the romance of the LED, the sheer eye-candy of monochromatic lighting will continue to delight us for years to come.

Will keep you updated as we dig out the RS422 adapters and start talking to the world inside these things.

Thanks to Justin’s hard work we have an internet party line link to two teletypes at NYCResistor.

Here’s some video of us watching the live feed of teletype traffic coming in from the internets.