NYC Resistor

The Simple Serial Display is a trivial accessory for your PC, Mac, or microcontroller to act as an always-on information display for whatever data you can serialize and push out of a traditional tty port.  Since I’m out of grad school on winter break, I decided to clean it up a bit and make it look nice.

This project came out of some hacking that Hilary Mason and I were doing back in ’09 for fun.  At Barcamp 2009, we presented it as a trivial project for anyone to build without complex electronics and with friendly Python and PySerial – a project within reach of any dev or sysadmin that might stare at progress bars.  One compelling use is to monitor long-running tasks, such as your mega MapReduce job.  The display includes an LED “flag” to alert you to whatever you care to be alerted about, such as the end of a job or an interruption, and the LCD panel can print simple progress bars or animated slash marks to track job completion.

The original design remains the same (specifications can be found in the Slideshare-hosted presentation below) leveraging a common FTDI brand serial cable (or similar,) and Sparkfun’s two line text LCD with their “Serial Backpack” adapter.

I dug around in the Resistor scrap bin and found a nice 6mm thick piece of clear acrylic, and used Zignig’s Box-o-Tron parametric box generator found on Thingiverse (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:404) to construct the enclosure. After some tweaks and prototyping with foamcore board, I came away with a delightfully tight design.  Considering this is my first project on the Epilog, I’m happy it didn’t require a lot of trial and error.

As with all casual projects, there’s a lot of room for improvement, but I’m pleased with the output of today’s effort.

Some friends at a local university reached out to us recently and offered to let us rescue a robot from a junkyard fate. Not being in the business of turning down free robots, we quickly agreed. Three of us showed up on Monday in a Ford Escape. We left in a U-Haul.

This beast of a machine weighs in at 550lbs. It’s a Gilson Cyberlab C400 Automated Plate Preparation Workstation. We’re not exactly sure what that is, but we do know that it has a huge robotic gantry meant to move at high speed with accurate positioning. And it has neuroprobes. What are we going to do with it? Maybe it will be the next BarBot. Or a 3D Printer. Or maybe some sort of exercise machine. We’re not sure yet. Check the vids.

Looking for a unique gift for a friend or loved one? Why not consider giving them the gift of learning at one of NYCR’s great classes.

We have some really great classes in the upcoming weeks, click descriptions for more info:

December 18 – FIRE THE LAZZZOR ORNAMENTS* -
Last chance to make an ornament or small gift for a relative:
January 14 – FIRE THE LAZZZOR -
Our standard handy rapid-prototyping LASER CLASS
January 15 – NYCR Arduino/Soldering 101 -
Make your own Arduino and Learn to Program it!
January 22 – Soft Circuits -
Learn to make soft, flexible and washable electronic circuits embedded right into common textiles! We’ll cover conductive thread,…
January 28 – Intro to Adobe Illustrator -
Are you curious about how to make vector graphics?…

*Also, as an FYI– the material covered in the Dec 18th LAZZZOR CLASS will be the same overview as in our standard FIRE THE LAZZZOR classes, and your attendance will qualify you for future laser use at our laser nights.