NYC Resistor

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.

We’re time lapsing, and Mr Stabby is here getting his API action on… literally.

Stop by what we are calling battle station resistor in the deep recesses of the hacker caves.

If you have spare sparkfun line relay breakouts… we could use 4 to six if you have some to spare… otherwise we’ll be rube goldeberg a solution.

First some credits on the video:

Alicia Gibbs: Camera Woman
Adam Mayer: Sound and Special Effects Engineer
Raphael Abrams: Hacker 2
Charles Pax: Hacker 1
Matt Joyce: Himself

Special thanks to Nick Farr, and NYCResistor for their continued support

www.hackersonaplane.info
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That’s a long title. I know. But filled with awesome. Fatman and Circuit Girl is an internet video series that is the culmination of the combined efforts of the indomitable Jeri Ellsworth, and the 8-bit era superstar Fatman (George Sanger). Earlier this year Fatman and Circuit girl did a live show at Notacon. I was running a hackspace at Notacon with the help of Mitch Altman (who is a hell of a guy). However, the night before Notacon we were running into some problems with our mode of transportation to Notacon. Our man with a van so to speak was without the proverbial van. So I called everyone I knew who wouldn’t mind a call at 11 at night and might be willing to shuffle off to Cleveland at a moments notice. This basically was a very very short list. But as luck would have it… Nick Farr came through with a car ( a now infamous vehicle known amongst the hacker world as mr black, though very nearly mr pink ). We still needed a backup driver. So I called Noah, figured this sort of event would be right up his alley. And sure enough he was excited to go. So he joined NYCR members Rose and myself on a trip to overcast Cleveland. We had a great time, and Noah was able to show off his augmented reality rig at Fatman and Circuit girl’s live show. Anyways this is the video from that event.

Oh the stories we have… and the videos that follow.

ShmooCon is an information security conference held in Washington DC, this past weekend. About 1300 people attended talks ranging from DIY UAV design to disk recovery methodology. It was an intensely fun time. HACDC the local DC hackerspace and close friends of NYCResistor hosted a pretty amazing party inside of a church down there. I remember grabbing rubens with Nick Farr and company at around 6 am the following morning, and thinking… goddamn I am glad I came. However, as of Friday around 1 pm I had still not left NYC. I was working and being a generally busy person. But I got a call from an unnamed person whom we will for the sake of time refer to as “Deep Throat”. Several hackerspace members had arrived at Shmoo to discover that this year’s badges were in fact made of acryllic.

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October 11-13 next week is the 11th ISWC (International Symposium on Wearable Computers). This year it’s being held in Boston and they have some great tutorials scheduled including Building Soft Computers: 1. Materials, Techniques, and Tools. 2. Introduction to Designing Mobile Applications with On-body Sensing. 3. The Role of Design in Wearable Computing, and 4. Wearable Technologies for Persons with Autism Spectrum Conditions.

It seems like a really interesting conference with an impressive lineup of speakers, workshops and discusssions. I’m going to be in Boston around the same time giving a talk at SND so I might try and sneak over there and see what they are up to. Anyone planning on attending this?

http://iswc.net/