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Nick Bilton

Nick Bilton.

Jun 282008
 


Reconfigurable House 2 at Place@Space at Z33.be from Adam Somlai-Fischer on Vimeo

A fascinating project coming out on July 4th-6th at the Hungarian Cultural Centre in London. The project is called The Scattered House and is best described as:

The Reconfigurable House is an environment constructed from thousands of low tech components that can be “rewired” by visitors. The project is a critique of ubiquitous computing “smart homes”, which are based on the idea that technology should be invisible to prevent DIY.

The project comes from the group reorient.hu that also created this video below for a technically inspired architectural piece for a show in Venice in 2006.


Reorient Migrating Architecture Exhibition

Jun 272008
 

A few weeks ago Danielle made some homemade marshmallows that were sacrificed to a jacobs ladder with the partial goal of toasting them—as you can see from the video, it pretty much did the trick. Well the edification of some ‘mallows gave birth to an idea and this time she took it one step further and created the worlds first (real) S’More Cupcake, this time the marshmallow melting took place with a small blowtorch, but irrelevant of the heating utensil, they are pretty awesome. LINK

DSC 5210

Jun 162008
 

I was on a photography lightning kick for a little while… whenever a storm struck in Brooklyn I ran to my deck, set up the camera on a tripod and opened the timer for 30 seconds, hoping that luck was on my side (in every respect) and that everything was pointing in the right direction to capture a bolt or 2 in my lens. This process usually takes about 20 minutes, involves me getting soaked, and scares the absolute %^$# out of me when the storm gets closer. Needless to say, I’ve lucked out every once in a while and captured the odd picture like this:

Lightning in Brooklyn

Well, as I was slouched my laptop last night I came across Maruice Ribble’s website (what a cool name!): Glacial Wanderer. The site has some very cool and simple projects with Miss Arduino and her trusty friends (XPORT, etc.). But he also has a great program/hack to detect lightning and set off a camera trigger to fire your shutter, all in 67ms, while lighting sticks around for a 100ms.

Camera trigger hack lightning

In the Robotics section of his site there are other super simple projects that are really well documented and tremendiously useful. The code is all there for you, diagrams, circuits and photos. It’s a nice little resource for some camera and sensor hacks.

Jun 042008
 

Pleo is a company making intersting ‘robots for human interaction’. The video above is a demo of Ugobi, a life-like dinosaur. It has 35 touch sensors in it’s back and numerous servos controling all aspects of it’s body. It’s a pretty interesting product, and anything that helps bring robots into the mainstream I’m all for. Anyone seen these in person, or even better, hacked one?

Apr 132008
 

NYCResistor Meeting

We have our monthly study group coming up. Bring your projects to discuss with a group of like minded nerdy people, chat about potential blinking, buzzing, whirring things you’d like to build, or come by and talk to us about classes you would like to take (or see us offer).

The next meeting is Wednesday, April 23rd from 7-9 p.m. at the NYCResistor Headquarters. 397 Bridge Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201 — 5th Floor, look for the pack of resistors on the door. Suggested donation is $5 (or more if you’re feelin’ generous) to help pay the electric bill/rent.

Viva La’ Resistors!

Apr 082008
 

NYCResistor Infrastructure Meeting

Just a reminder that we have a bunch of great classes coming up in the next couple of months. There’s our Soldering 101, Electronics 102, Electonics – Simple Circuits 101, Gameboy Hacking 101, Rapid Prototyping with Blender, and then there’s our Arduino Series that will teach you programming for Arduino. Zach (pictured above) will be teaching Arduino 101 – Hello World, Arduino 102 – if Funky, get Loopy, and Arduino 103 – Sensory Overload. These classes are designed to be really inexpensive so sign up now before they are all sold out.

And don’t be intimidated if you’ve never touched an LED before, or don’t even know what one is… that’s what these classes are for! Also, if you have any questions about which classes you should take or whether you’re ready for the 102 classes, just shoot us an email and we’ll be happy to help.

Apr 082008
 

Liquidware has a great touch shield out for the Arduino. It’s a 128×128 OLED display with a resistive touch screen on top. It can hold up to 60 full screen images and only uses pins 3 and 4 on your Arduino. It may seem pricey at just over $100, but it’s worth every penny considering everything that’s packed onto that little shield (they even managed to squeeze in 16MB of on board video ram). You can pick one up here and you can look at the open source code here. If you end up getting one, let us know what you end up building with it… I’m off to buy one now!

Arduino Touch Shield

Apr 042008
 

robot soccer

This weekend will be New York’s first Robotics Competition. It’s going to be held at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center @ 655 W. 34th St., New York, NY 10001 and will including a bunch of funny looking robots running around kicking soccer balls at each other.

Working in teams, students have just six weeks to create their robot. They get the opportunity to work with programmable radio controls, pneumatics, motors, electrical circuits, mechanics, machining, web design, computer animation, computer assisted design, and other technologies – just like professional engineers and technologists do. Following the six-week design and build phase, teams enter local and regional competitions.