NYC Resistor

The latest branch in my career as a wandering hacker: puppetcircuits.

I’m working with puppeteers here in New York on some full scale robotic puppet heads. This is a new field for me, so I decided to document it and share what I learn with the community. It’s going to be a mix of electronics, robotics, sculpting, sewing and crafting. There’s a lot that I’m going to learn!

Four talented hackers from NYU are planning to spend the summer building Diaspora “the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network”.

This is a particularly timely project in the wake of the recent “open” graph announcements at F8 and the debate about data ownership.

Project Diaspora will be open-source, with a subscription hosted solution. They’re raising money to pay for their time developing the project over the summer.

You can read more about the project and the business plan and pledge your support on their Kickstarter page.

Quoting an excerpt from Mitch seen on Make Blog:

Notacon was way wonderful this year. The Hardware Hacking Area was way bigger than last year (as is the case *everywhere*!), and it was totally hopping! More than a third of people at the con made something!

Cornfield Electronics
572 Hill St.
San Francisco, CA 94114
Mitch Altman mitch@CornfieldElectronics.com

Mitch is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. He’s dedicated himself to going around the planet ( quite literally ) and getting people of all ages excited about making stuff. I helped Mitch run the hardware hacking space at Notacon the year before last, and it was amazing. This year was even better thanks to the local Cleveland hackerspace guys. And I’ve been pretty adamant about Notacon being one of my favorite conferences. It’s small, but it’s got great people, and one of the only demo scene events in the US. Hearing this really makes me feel horrible. I’ve been to almost every Notacon since Notacon 1, and I’ve never had an issue inside of the conference area. People tend to look out for each other. I can’t imagine what someone would be thinking when they took this stuff.

Anyways, if you have any idea where / what happened to Mitch’s stuff please step up and right the wrong.

I am not currently aware of any sort of formal effort to help get Mitch back on his feet with a supply of kits. But, I suppose the biggest issue here is time. Getting new boards, components, and kits put together for upcoming events could be tough if not impossible. Hoping whoever is responsible has a change of heart. Spreading this throughout the community hopefully will get their attention.

Anyways our thoughts are with Mitch right now.

May 15th is approximately half-way to Halloween and we just can’t wait any longer. Put on your best costume and come on out for our ridiculously early Halloween party!

• May 15th 9p-???
• NYCR 87 3rd Ave 4th floor
• No door charge, so BYOB.
• Prizes for best costume and best hat!
• Costumes are required! Wear one or we’ll put one on you!

There are still a number of tickets available this Saturday for a new class here at Resistor.  It’s called Fun with Touch Sensors, and it features a lot of hands on interaction with the kinds of sensors you find in a iPod click wheel or smartphone touch screen. I think it will be a lot of fun, and it should give you some ideas about making your own interactive devices for fun, art, or practical purposes.

Every student gets a kit with a QT1106 Breakout board, a slider module, a wheel module, a small breadboard, a shift register, some LEDs with resistors, and even a plastic box and battery holder!

Here’s Joel’s video showing off the sensors:

If you’re on the fence, we’ve got a special TOUCHTHIS coupon code for the event that takes $10 off the admission price.  Just enter it in the Eventbrite registration page.

Join DIYbio NYC this Wednesday while we screen the PBS documentary ‘Naturally Obsessed’. We’ll kick things off around 8pm, but come early to get a good seat. Following the movie stick around for a lively discussion about what it is to be a scientist and how the concept has been changing over the past few years.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Time: 8:00pm – 10:00pm
The Resistor Hackerspace
87 3rd Avenue, 4th Floor
Brooklyn, NY

Space is super-generously donated by the Resistor Hackerspace in downtown Brooklyn.

NATURALLY OBSESSED tells a vivid, suspenseful story about a trio of students going for their PhD degrees. They are in a race to beat the competition to discover the switch that controls appetite in the human body – but the pressure is on, as each student also struggles with a personal challenge. Rob, a perennial dropout, dares himself to stay the course. Kilpatrick has to choose between the easy life and academic success. Gabriele hovers between high aspirations and self doubt. Their guide and mentor, Larry, is a young professor deeply committed to passing on the baton of science. He urges his students to apply their creativity to solve tough problems, while encouraging them to accept the emotional roller coaster of doing science.

NATURALLY OBSESSED opens a penetrating view of laboratory life, provides unique insights into what it’s like to do biological research and honestly portrays the quid-pro-quo of the apprentice system, by which students working for their PhD degree work under a master scientist at the frontiers of biomedical research. Drawn from three years of filming, live action scenes capture the day-by-day experiences of doing science, highlighting the ups and downs of the mentor-student relationship, the collaboration that science depends on, and the self-knowledge that success requires. The film was shot at the Shapiro laboratory at the Columbia University Medical Center. In a way that the lay person can easily understand, it presents a picture of the lab’s advanced techniques in genetic engineering, protein chemistry and x-ray crystallography, which are paving the way for a new generation of structure-based drugs – “designer drugs” — specifically targeted to correct malfunctioning, disease-causing, proteins. (The remarkably successful HIV protease inhibitor was the first of the kind.)

I spent a decent portion of yesterday on the laser, prototyping a tiny embroidery hoop for (duh) tiny embroidery. I'm pretty happy with the results. So much in fact that I've decided to start offering tiny embroidery kits along side my tiny dinosaur kits.

The embroidery hoop is made from laser cut acrylic, and the rubber band provides tension to keep everything in place. The whole thing measures 1.5" across, a standard sewing machine bobbin is show for scale in the picture above. I actually neglected to save the cut file (oops) but it's pretty simple: two concentric rings (0.2" wide), with the outside diameter of the smaller ring being 0.05" smaller than the inside diameter of the larger ring. The large ring has a "nub" on the side for the rubber band, and is split down the middle on that side.

There's about a 1" diameter working area. I used 28 count aida fabric, which gave me approximately 28 "pixels" across to work with. Chris helped me design a cupcake chart for counted cross stitch. It uses 7 colors: white, red, light pink, dark pink, pink, grey, and light grey. It's a nice portable project because it fits in your pocket. I've listed a kit for sale on Etsy and may bring a few down to Spring BadaBing in Richmond, VA this weekend.

Here's the chart for your cross-stitch pleasure:

Zach needed a parabola in QCAD, so I whipped up a quick script to generate DXF parabolas.  Source inside.

Read more

I gave Zach several months to post this. And he hasn’t. I am not sure why, but it’s probably because he’s too busy advancing his skills and the capacity of his makerbots to take the time. A few months ago we hosted an amazing hackathon at NYC Resistor. During that event Bill was hard at work getting to grips with how the model 15-ro teletype, that I bought on e-bay for a dollar, operated.

It turns out the teletype only has 2 electromechanical parts… the motor and an actuator. Everything else is mechanical. All the amazing engineering and mind blowing beauty aside… that makes it very difficult to debug the device. So while Bill was struggling to step the device through it’s instructions Zach was building and perfecting yet another makerbot.

As the two of them conversed about their trials and tribulations Zach set out to use his makerbot to help Bill out. He designed a gear that bill could use to manually advance the main rotational shaft in the device and thusly step through instructions. Moderately simple little thing, but obviously designing these obvious components is… somewhat harder than it looks.

The amazing part to me isn’t the component made by zach, or the teletype. It’s the fusion of a prototyped component made using 2010 technology used to solve a problem on a 1930s machine. Just because two guys working on very different projects just happened to be sitting next to each other when they worked on their respective contraptions.

To me the image of this one new component on this amazing piece of antiquity is a thing of subtle beauty. A clash of cultures, a contrast of design, and a community of exceptional craft all there in one simple photo. Sometimes a thousand words simply isn’t enough to describe it.

Anyways, I hope you guys are seeing something as amazing here as I am.

Hello all! Just wanted to remind you that the Paper Engineering class is this Saturday at 1-3pm. If you’d like to learn how to design pop-ups and paper mechanisms, come check it out!

This isn’t a template based class – in other words I won’t be making everyone cut out and build the same pop-up flower or anything. Instead I will be teaching the actual basic mechanisms and principles we use in the industry! You will learn how you can push the limits and build mechanisms upon each other to make any design you so desire.

Class is $40, includes materials. Register at http://paperengineering.eventbrite.com/

DIY Paper Engineering, Saturday, April 10 from 1-3pm

NYCResistor
87 3rd Avenue,
4th Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11217