NYC Resistor

The Fun with Coils workshop is coming up – Saturday Feb. 13th from 4-6pm. Mess around with coils to make custom instrument pickups, junkbox loudspeakers, secret transmitters, and more! You can sign up on eventbrite.

htink will be hosting a Linux tutorial, today Tuesday, Jan 26 2010. Both Ben Combee and Myself have volunteered to assist. This will not be at NYC Resistor however, look for it at Bug Labs ( your friendly neighborhood purveyor of fine open source micro-controllers ). I do not work for British Telecom =P.

If you’ve ever wanted some guidance in the Unix world, this is a tremendous opportunity. The folks that will be available to you are all very talented. If you’re interested, more details HERE!

Mitch Altman is in town next, and will be giving one of his famous workshops at NYC Resistor. Mitch has taught thousands of people to solder and make cool things with microcontrollers at his workshops at hacker spaces and hacker conferences and schools almost everywhere. He can teach you, too, if you like.

If you have ever had any curiosity about making something with electronics, then please join us. Anyone and everyone can learn to make cool things. And it’s fun. And easy! You can learn to make something cool with electronics in one workshop, and take your cool project home with you!

*What*: Make Cool Things With Microcontrollers! workshop.
*Where*: NYC Resistor, 397 Bridge Street, 5th Floor.
*When*: 8pm, 29-January, Friday. (It is totally OK to come late.) Stay as little or as long as you like. Most projects take about 1 to 2 hours.
*Who*: It is fun to make things in the friendly community of NYC Resistor. Come join us. All skill levels. 18 years old and up. Everyone is welcome.
*Cost*: Instruction is Free! If you use any kits, reimbursment for kit price is requested ($10 to $20, depending on kit). There will be plenty of cool kits available to build, including:

TV-B-Gone (turn off TVs in public places!)
Brain Machine (Meditate, Hallucinate, and Trip Out!)
LEDcube (cool cube of blinky lights!)
Mignonette Game (play fun games!)
Trippy RGB Waves (interactive colored blinky lights!)
MiniPOV (more cool blinky lights!)
MintyBoost (charge your USB enabled gadgets!)

and for the more advanced:
microcontroller programmers (program all your AVR family chips!), Arduino clones (make just about anything!), and more.

More info on most of most of these projects is available on Mitch’s website: http://www.CornfieldElectronics.com (click on the “maker faire” tab). If you have your own project, please bring it by and make it with us in the friendly community of NYC Resistor.

Mitch is the brains behind Cornfield Electronics, and one of the co-founders of Noisebridge hackerspace in San Francisco. Mitch is best known as the inventor of TV-B-Gone, but his list of great hacks and cool electronics includes a lot of other great projects. When he is not at Noisebridge building awesome and amazing things, he is on the road from hackerspace to Hacker-Con and back again, sharing his love of electronics.

On Saturday, January 9th, we’ve got a great workshop called “CMOS Music : 1-Bit Chiptunes” taught by Phillip Stearns a.k.a Pixel Form. You’ll make a simple music synthesizer using a combination of analog and digital electronics. No programming here, just wiring and learning about musical waveforms.

The next Saturday, the 16th, we have NYC Resistor’s own Ranjit Bhatnagar, a staple of Handmade Music night, helping people make electric guitars out of household items in a class we like to call “Junk Guitar Workshop”.  You bring your own wood for the guitar neck, we supply the rest.

More classes will be posted soon… the Winter is cold, so come down to NYC Resistor for some hot classes!

If you’ve not been closely watching our calendar, you might have missed Shelby’s DIY Paper Engineering class that’s this Saturday, December 5th. Shelby is a new member of the group and a frequent Craft Night attendee. Her day job is designing pop-up books and cards, and this class will be a two-hour introduction to making your own pop-up things.

You can get all of the details and sign up for the class at http://paperengineering.eventbrite.com/.

Have you checked the NYCR Class list lately? No? You’re seriously missing out. We have a ton of new classes as well as some old favorites. Here’s a sampling of some upcoming classes:

Blender 101: User Interface and Basic Modeling – Nov 21
Learn to use Blender, a free 3D modeling program, to model just about anything. Use your completed models in your own programs, create new objects for games, or send them over to a Makerbot to be printed in real life.

Hack Classic Nintendo Games – Nov 28
Hack around with your favorite NES games using emulators. This class will teach the basics of 8-bit computing, memory addressing, explanation of buffer overflows and how memory works. And what better way to learn those things?

Radio and Antenna Design 2 dates! Nov 28 or Nov 29!
Foxx D’Gamma leads a discussion all about radio waves and how to design antennas to work with radio systems. There’s lots of useful information here whether you’re getting into ham radio or you’re trying to improve the range on your 2.4GHz WiFi router.

Beginning PHP Dec 5
Our intro PHP course is back! Get started writing dynamic content for the web, or just pick up what you need to know to start hacking away at your favorite CMS (Wordpress, anyone?). No prior programming experience necessary!

Code Your Own Spam Filter Dec 6
This class is a gentle introduction to the document classification techniques used in spam filters, news sites, and language detectors. We’ll cover simple parsing, feature selection, and naive bayesian classification. By the end of the class, you’ll have written your own Twitter spam (or interestingness or happiness or annoyingness) filter, and have the code and tools to develop your own projects.

PS, tired of missing out on awesome classes because they fill up before you know about them? Add the NYC Resistor Class RSS feed to your reader, and get the scoop on classes right as they’re posted.

We’re excited to promote The Parts and Crafts Collective! Kids and young adults are the future  and we love knowing they’ll be exposed to hardware hacking with William Macfarlane and his team of super teachers. The Parts and Crafts Collective is hosting kids classes around NYC, check out their eventbrite page for details and registration.

I don’t know what to say. I’m getting all choked up. It’s just… I’m overwhelmed by the sheer magnificence of this huge list of wonderful classes we have here. I think I’m going to cry. I’ll do my best:

Introduction to Electronics — the standard in getting yourself primed and ready to make awesome things even more awesome. With electricity!

Radio and Antenna Design — Can you believe we even have this class? Amazing!

Bender 101 — Learn to express yourself in 3D, either on the screen or in real solid objects.

Sob sob! Hold on… I’m OK… ahem,

Fire the Lazzzor! — Lasers! Real big giant zappy cutty lasers! Master the power of LASERS!

Electrocardiogram! — Romance and precision instrumentation join together to give your electronics some heart.

Joule Thievery — Get a lot from a little. Squeeeze those electrons and make them do your bidding.

Arduino/Soldering 101 — Double up! Learn so much in one session that your head will pop!

Build Your Own Retro Computer — Are you getting this? Build your own computer. From parts that are not already a computer. This is power.

Cry, cry, honk! Sniff. Running down my face are tears of joy! I’m so glad we had this talk.

This weekend there are four nifty classes in which to swell your brain full of fabulous information! Whee!

Back by popular demand, Arduino Web Server. An amazing trick that you ought to know:   http://www.eventbrite.com/event/379352654

And for beginners with the desire to make a beautiful and professional electronics project we have Printed Circuit Board Design with EAGLE CAD:      http://www.eventbrite.com/event/393349519

Like lasers? How about lasers that can cut things? Well, we have one and we will teach you how to use it! I know! Amazing!    http://lazzzor.eventbrite.com/

Hey you! How about a nice cheap beginners soldering class? You’ll feel great!    http://www.eventbrite.com/event/397488900

This is gong to be an amazingly educational weekend!

Nick and Alicia worry that their ninja glove messages might get intercepted.

Back in December 2008, the awesome teaching team of Kate Hartman and Rob Faludi ran a workshop on Wireless Wearables. On May 3, they’re doing it again.

The workshop covers what wireless is and isn’t (”calling it wireless is about as accurate as calling it tomatoless”), how to choose materials for soft circuits, and common problems when configuring the XBee. The materials fee means you’ll walk home with your own LilyPad XBee board, an XBee radio, a battery pack, and whatever it is you’ve sewn it into.

Sign ups are open now: http://wirelesswearables.eventbrite.com/