New in the NYCR vending machines are Teensy 2.0 boards. They have ATMega32U4 chips, which have the built in USB drivers and, via LUFA, can appear as any USB device, not just a serial communications device. Want to make a MIDI device show up as a USB keyboard? Or a core memory as a mass storage device? You can do that! The USB doesn’t consume a UART, so there is still a serial port available for interfacing with GPS or other external RS232 devices.

PJRC makes the Teensyduino plugin for the Arduino IDE and a set of compatible libraries so that you can use it with your Arduino sketches. Or you can drop into straight C and take full advantage of all of the AVR pins.

Update: They are very popular! Three were bought during Craftnight tonight.

The Resistor JelTone is an edible and playable toy piano created by NYC Resistor members Ranjit Bhatnagar, Astrida Valigorsky, Mimi Hui and Catarina Mota for the annual Gowanus Studio Jello Mold Competition.

As part of our investigation into the properties of Jello– we realized that both jello and fruit, are conductive. To create the Jeltone, we fabricated several flavors (tangerine, coconut, greentea, etc.) of Jello in key-shaped slabs. Each key was then perched atop a food safe sterling silver pin connected to an Arduino microcontroller (hidden conveniently underneath the piano’s lasercut acrylic base).  To complete the circuit, and play a noise, a metal utensil can be connected to the Arduino, or it can be played with gloves enhanced with conductive thread. Bare hands can also play the jeltone by touching both a key and the piano’s case at the same time. Alternately you can also make the Jeltone using slabs of  fruit.

If you’d like to make your own, you can get the project files, code and instructions from Thingiverse.

JelTones were exhibited on June 25th at the 2011 Solid Sound Festival, Mass MoCA and at the Jello Mold Competition (where it was awarded the creativity prize and was both played with and devoured by the exhibit visitors).

Some friends of mine have a house in the mountains in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.  In the winter they dig a luge track in the (many feet of) snow in their yard and have timed sled races to see who can make it down the fastest. They call it the Mario Cup. I went out there last week with my buddy Mario (a member at Artisan’s Asylum and the namesake of the race) and we made some improvements to the system. Details below.

As you can see, the luge is several hundred feet long and on the side of a mountain, so it’s tough for a person with a stopwatch to know when to start and stop the time.  Here I am testing the track before we had finished it; at the end, I’m a tiny little dot in the snow.

Mario and his girlfriend also helped calibrate the track.

Recently, the competition has become fierce and the accuracy of a stopwatch-wielding human isn’t enough to conclusively pick a winner.  So we automated it.

We designed a system so a “race official” would start the clock by hitting a button on a controller, which would sound a loud countdown of beeps and then start the clock.   The luger would take off from the start line down the track.  Arduinos hooked to sensors would detect when the luger passed the start, midpoint, and finish lines.  The arduinos were also connected to Xbee radios to communicate the time at which the racer passed by.

It took a while to sort out which sensor would work best.  We tinkered around with tilt sensors, photointerrupters, Hall effect sensors, and proximity sensors.  We ended up with plain old photoresistors wrapped in plastic wrap, sealed with tape, and buried in snow under an upside-down disposable plastic food container.  That way, the luger would slide right over the sensor, block the bright white light coming off the snow, and trigger the arduino to note the time and send it back to the controller.  Here we are setting up the sensors and tuning them in fast forward.

And here I am, soldering up voltage dividers in the snow. Potentiometers are difficult to find in Steamboat, but the snow keeps beer cold while you resolder new resistors, so I’m calling it a wash.

Finally, we got the sensors tuned just so.

The timing data was sent by radio back to the controller, which showed the time on an LCD display.

Now truth and justice will prevail in the Steamboat Backyard Luge Association races.  More information can be found here: http://mariocup.tumblr.com/

Next steps for the project include adding in two sensors at the start, midpoint, and finish so we can know the luger’s speed at each point, and adding in some fancy blinding-bright luxeon 1-watt LEDs to give the luger a proper starting signal like a christmas tree at a drag race.  Any excuse to go back will do.

This Sunday, December 12th, we’ve got another Arduino/Soldering 101 class — you’ll learn soldering techniques by building your own Freeduino board, then you’ll get to learn some basic programming. This is one of our most popular classes, and it’s always a great time.

Then, the following Saturday, the 18th, is our first Build a MIDI Percussion Instrument class. We’re going to be making computer-controlled noisemakers using solenoids then doing a nice jam session with a sequencer running all the devices. This should be a lot of fun.

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

Requirements:

1 HDSP 211x LED Display
1 SN74LS595N Low Current Shift Register
1 Arduino compatible board
1 current reference capacitor ( just for safety )

Schematic:

Source:

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.

Check out the video below for a brief explanation of how it works.  Two Arduino boards were used to drive the chart plotter and the Teletype.  Python with the Tweepy module and natural language toolkit was used for the interface to Twitter.

Special thanks to John Nagle for his guidance in getting the Teletype working, and to Trammel, Chris and Zach for the on-the-spot debugging. Thanks to Bre for the hot logos.  Credit for the project goes to Adam Mayer, Mark Tabry, Hilary Mason, and myself (wwward.)

Video by Eric Skiff

]]> http://www.nycresistor.com/2010/04/06/nycrteletype/feed/ 3 http://www.nycresistor.com/2010/03/28/first-peek-at-the-arduino-art-show/ http://www.nycresistor.com/2010/03/28/first-peek-at-the-arduino-art-show/#comments Sun, 28 Mar 2010 04:06:23 +0000 hudson http://www.nycresistor.com/?p=2794

(More photos coming tomorrow)