NYC Resistor

If you’ve been playing with the Arduino and want to figure out how to go to the next level, this Sunday’s Beyond Arduino class is for you.  Jarek Lupinski is going to be talking about how to breakboard your own designs using bare microcontrollers, how to program this chips using ICSPs, and how to downsize from the Arduino’s ATMega 328/168 to the less expensive ATtiny 45.

Details and registration at http://beyondarduino.eventbrite.com/

During Hackday I worked on a display for the Stabby ID.

I have six or so HDSP 2111 units lying around. They also come in green and red led models.

Read on for Schematic and Demo Arduino Source
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Video of our presentation at Hackday:

In the video,

Ben Combee is speaking, Max Henstell is working the stabster’s pneumatics and Mark Tabry is standing by to protect bystanders, and I am off camera to the left looking pretty for the cameras.

Not in the video is Bill Ward, Charles Pax, as well as the original Max.

* Special thanks to my friend Adam from Twilio who provided us with some assistance in the effort.

For the blow by blow of the event check out our time lapse. Trust me it was 24 hours of tedium just as grueling as watching this 2.5 minute clip.

As you can see this was an pretty large effort by NYCR and a hell of a lot more went into this project than is readily apparent. Just getting the equipment there was an event all its own. Max and Charles worked tirelessly to repair Stabby’s pneumatic stabber arm. Max also worked on wiring up the actuators and accompanying arduino code to link up with Ben, Bill, and Marks twilio interface code base. I worked with Mark on a display that showed debug info from the arduinos ( blogarythmic cred ) as well as caller ( aka stabber ) id when stabbing.

We finished up about 5 minutes before time was called… literally. Came down to the wire. Stabby was awarded a runner up award, and supposedly will be on display at Tech Crunch on Wednesday some time during the day.

We had a hell of a lot of fun, and were excited to present a functioning project ( a first for me =P ). Even more exciting was winning a runner up award in a contest that didn’t actually have runner up awards. I guess they were afraid of being stabbed.

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!

NYC Resistor was invited to exhibit our old Teletype Model 15 at Eyebeam’s MIXER event last March.  To make life interesting, we used a small Python program to grab tweets from Twitter matching the “eyebeam” keyword.  Watching a 50+ year old device once used to bang out the news of the day turn to printing the trivialities of the moment seems to echo the fate of professional journalists as the world’s attention span dwindles. To make things more interesting, we used a sentiment analysis algorithm to parse incoming tweets for positive or negative sentiment. The results were reflected on an old chart plotter. Positive sentiments moved the mark left. The middle of the paper represented neutral sentiment. Click the image for more photos and a video awaits after the break.

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Our new space is pretty amazing, but there was one thing we still needed. We are on the 4th floor of our building, and the stairs were a little hard for first time visitors to find. We had a temporary remedy:

but obviously this would not do as a permanent installation, especially with our big event on Saturday!

So here is the new sign.

Thanks to Ryan for help with the circuit design, and thanks to Adam for the Arduino code (yes the Arduino is overkill but we decided it was appropriate considering the theme of the art show!). Let me tell you, this sign was fun to make!

Adam wrote the Arduino code in about 2 minutes, and here it is:
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Check out Arduino Prototype 0 @NYCResistor on Saturday night at the art exhibition: Art, Design, and the Arduino: a lineage

photo provided by Massimo Banzi

Several other prototypes from the collections of Massimo Banzi, Tom Igoe and Nick Zambetti will be on display.

Exhibition curated by Alicia Gibb, based on the work of her master’s thesis

To see a sneak peak of artists showing works see Bre’s post on Arduino Superstars!

RSVPs are appreciated:

@NYCResistor

March 27th, 2010  8-12pm

87 3rd Avenue, 4th floor

$10

Works include a lineage of variations, modifications and relations to the Arduino microcontroller
Hc Gilje
Aaron Koblin
Hernando Barragán
Edith Kollath
Jan Borchers & René Bohne
Becky Stern
Ranjit Bhatnagar
Oscar G. Torres & Jackoon
Raphael Abrams
Joe Saavedra

Curated by Alicia Gibb, based on the work of her master’s thesis

Special thanks to Shelby Arnold for designing the invite.

Bill, Alicia, Hilary, Diana and the Cake

NYC Resistor made a huge showing at Yahoo Open Hack Day NYC this year.  Team Makerbot showed up with the New York Toast, featuring their latest “Frostruder” prototype, an amazing attachment which turns the Makerbot 3D printer into a confectioner’s dream.  And in the spirit of edible technology, Alicia, Bill, Diana and Hilary gathered to create the “Delicious Cake.” The cake was, in fact, NOT a lie.

The Cake represents the sentiment – positive, neutral or negative – of a keyword as represented on Delicious.com, Yahoo’s social bookmarking service. The cake was made to look like the Delicious.com logo, and LED “faces” were used to indicate the sentiment. Hilary wrote the code for the sentiment analysis, Bill wrote the code that drove the Arduino controller, Diana soldered the LED faces, and Alicia assembled the electronics and decorated the cake itself.

You can see more of the cake at Alicia’s Flickr Stream or at Bill’s. We were also featured on CNN: http://bit.ly/ddNm3

Find out more at Diana and Hilary’s blogs:

Diana’s blog: http://fashionnerd.com/2009/10/yahoo-open-hackday-nyc/

Hilary’s blog: http://www.hilarymason.com/blog/yahoo-openhacknyc-the-del-icio-us-cake/