New Work City is a fantastic co-working at Broadway and Canal in manhattan. If you’ve never checked out a co-working space, it’s a lot like NYC Resistor, except instead of gathering in the evenings to hack on projects, it’s a place for freelancers, entrepreneurs, and anyone else who works for themselves to get stuff done.
It’s also a great source of community and connections, and as New Work City starts ramping up their own classes, we’re doing a bit of cross promotion. We think many of the classes will be interesting to the NYCR community!
Kevin Green, who is making a new Arduino compatible rapid prototyping board, approached us to see if we’d be interested in chatting about his new project. It’s essentially like an Arduino, but instead of just having rows of headers that you can plug anything into, it’s designed to accept any of a bunch of pluggable sensors and parts. It has a breadboard built in, and it dresses like a New Yorker (that is, all in black), so it looks pretty rad. I asked Kevin a few questions about the project, which you can read after the jump, or you can head straight to his kickstarter here
(CORRECTION! This class is on SUNDAY, not saturday as originally written here.)
Our most popular class, Arduino and Soldering 101, is running again this Sunday (Dec 12th), and still has a few spaces left. If you’ve been curious about electronics and Arduino at all, this is where to start.
Make your own Arduino and learn how to use it in the same class!
Description:
This is your friendly introductory class to soldering and
micro-controllers. In this three-hour class we will:
Solder together a Freeduino board (an Arduino Duemilanove-compatible board)
Learn how to program it using the Arduino environment
Wire up several circuits and load up code to read sensors and light LEDs
Show you how to get more help in the future for all your projects
When you leave, you’ll have a micro-controller, a mini-USB cable, a power supply and a few programs to play with.
The class will be taught by NYC Resistor members Liz Arum and Charles Pax.
Hilary and I will be speaking at the Y+30 meetup this coming monday at the 92nd street Y as part of a panel that will be discussing how people will communicate with machines (and vice versa) and with one another through machines.
The Y+30 meetup examines how various aspects of our lives might look in 30 years, and this panel should be very interesting! For my part, I’ll be bringing my experiments with openFrameworks, openCv, and some very raw Kinect hacking (thanks Widget!) as well as my monome.
Event Excerpt:
As technology continues to evolve and innovate at breakneck speeds, we’ve seen human behavior upended in a miraculously short span of time. Not only has our manner of communication changed, but the very notion of communication and the communicative abilities available to us are completely different. How people relate to one another professionally, socially, and artistically are different than even ten years ago, and will likely be much different thirty years from now. This panel will examine these ideas from multiple perspectives, including digital art, policy, social media, human- computer interfaces, and more. A diverse collection of technologists will speak on the subject, and there will be demonstrations of gadgets and interfaces from hack collective NYCResistor and an art installation piece from digital media institute Harvestworks.
Tickets for this event are $10 and are available through the 92Y Box Office and Venmo.
A few weeks ago, Google approached us to see if we’d be interested in throwing in a DemoSlam entry using the QR Code Waffles that we’d previously attempted. (hat tip to Foxx, who came up with the idea at a craft night)
After some successful experimentation with hand-drawn QR codes I put out a challenge to the rest of NYCR: The team that makes the most righteous, edible QR code that actually recognizes using google googles wins the prize.
Naturally, the prize started with “W” and ended with “affles”
As always, the amazing creativity and ingenuity that Resistors brought out for this project blew me away! Check out the video below, and lots more info on the various projects after that
Our slam came out great, but it’s impossible to show all of the amazing projects in the short span of the video. Here’s a roundup of all of the amazing hacks:
Ranjit’s awesome QR Code Tortilla took home the prize for being an amazing and edible food hack that recognized.
Raph put the new milling machine to work on a custom waffle iron, milling out the tiny blocks of the QR code. Unfortunately the milling didn’t quite work out, so no QR code waffle maker (or cattle branding) for us, but the iron itself recognized when it’s recesses were filled with flour, and the thing just looks gorgeous.
Jeff not only made a custom cast QR code icon, he also brought a ton of tiny jello “jiggler” cubes and made a beautiful QR code in google colors.
Zach got a Makerbot frostruder going and printed a working peanut-butter QR code on a slice of cheese
Adam said “om nom nom” as he ate his mashed-potatoes and gravy QR code, and also lead a crew using the laser to each out the QR code from a pancake
Chris, Nick, Ryan, and Ben assembled a QR code out of cheese-its, EZ-Cheese and posterboard.
Charles attempted a QR code out of microchips (chips are edible, right?)
And finally, thanks to Liz, Jon S, Jon K, and Herb, we actually got the QR code waffle to work, after lots of slicing and splicing and some judicious use of chicklets and chocolate chips.
It was an incredibly fun night, and huge thanks to everyone who threw a hack into the contest, helped put them together, and to everyone who was friendly to the crew as they joined us in the space for the shoot.
PPS: Huge thanks to LuckyNY for doing the shoot and being generally awesome to work with!
(For anyone curious about the music, it’s one of my 8-bit tracks “Underclocked” from “Resistor Anthems” which you can download free under a CC-BY license here: http://ericskiff.com/music)
Make your own Arduino and learn to program it! One of our most requested classes is back – come join us Sunday at noon and get started with Arduino, soldering, and electronics. There’s so much fun stuff you can do once you’ve got an Ardunio and some basic skills and this class gets you set up with both. No previous skills (programming, or soldering) required.
Video from our 48 Hour Hackathon featuring projects created during the event:
openFrameworks art, EL wire fashion, 3d printed bottle openers, LED email lights, massive LED matrix projects, and books hacked to hold digital collections of… books!
New Work City is a fantastic co-working at Broadway and Canal in manhattan. If you’ve never checked out a co-working space, it’s a lot like NYC Resistor, except instead of gathering in the evenings to hack on projects, it’s a place for freelancers, entrepreneurs, and anyone else who works for themselves to get stuff done. 
Kevin Green, who is making a new 
