Some friends at a local university reached out to us recently and offered to let us rescue a robot from a junkyard fate. Not being in the business of turning down free robots, we quickly agreed. Three of us showed up on Monday in a Ford Escape. We left in a U-Haul.

This beast of a machine weighs in at 550lbs. It’s a Gilson Cyberlab C400 Automated Plate Preparation Workstation. We’re not exactly sure what that is, but we do know that it has a huge robotic gantry meant to move at high speed with accurate positioning. And it has neuroprobes. What are we going to do with it? Maybe it will be the next BarBot. Or a 3D Printer. Or maybe some sort of exercise machine. We’re not sure yet. Check the vids.

I’m tired of my keys always jangling in my pocket, so I built a key-multi-tool out of a Crank Brother’s M5 bicycle tool. While I had the tool disassembled, I rearranged it so that the M3, M4 and #2 phillips were on the same side, which leaves room for five keys on the other side. It turns out other people had the the same idea. My keys still need cutting down since the key heads on the Medco keys are so large.

Inspired by Ranjit’s instrument-a-day (Make coverage), I’m writing a new wrist watch face every day for my progamable inPulse watch (more background). The full sources are posted online for others to build on.

Day 1 was a fixed point 3D rendering engine with a rotating Utah Teapot, day 2 was a rolling odometer or aviation altitude ticker display and day 3 is a 24-hour analog clock. This last one still needs some work.

Saturday May 7th! Come one, Come all!

NYCR will be hosting our super duper Interactive Show.

The theme this year is ANYTHING INTERACTIVE. That’s right, ANYTHING… INTERACTIVE. That includes people, peoples!

Music? yeah, we got it.
Blinking lights? hello? c’mon, you know we got that covered!
Stabby things? why do you think we have an 18+ policy?

So come and be creative, come and grab a drink, come and meet the Resistors. Screw it, it’s a Saturday night and we like to have an excuse for a blow out kind of party so just come!

$10 tickets in advance, $15 tickets at the door

Tickets now on sale

The inPulse watch is a great platform to hack on. It has an ARM7, 32 KB of flash and 8 KB of RAM, Bluetooth, a buzzer, an OLED screen and a button. Not much by today’s standards, but plenty to play around with. The programming environment is very much like a microcontroller; no multitasking, no dynamic memory, and very constrained memory/cpu. That is, of course, what makes it so much fun.

My multi-app framework attempts to make it possible to write multiple apps that can share the limited RAM by a technique similar to FORTRAN COMMON blocks. The main app.c file has the mainloop that calls the loop() method of the current app. This main loop also does a static allocation that fills the entire BSS; each app that is linked in rewrites it with its own local state while it is running. When the user holds the button for two seconds, the main app selects the next linked in app and call its init() method to allow it to perform its setup.

Since some of the apps need trig functions and there is no floating point support, I’ve written a fixed-point sin() and cos() function that are within +/- 0.0075 of the real sin function. Close enough for most government work… The function and lookup table consume 157 bytes of flash and no precious RAM. I haven’t benchmarked the performance, although most of the apps already have time-delays to only redraw the screen at 30 fps.

There are still several things that need to be done to make the watch usable as a watch. The most important is power management. Even in “powersave mode”, the battery runs dry in about three hours. Clearly it is not saving much by turning off the display.

The other two major requirements are a local build environment and a more accurate simulator. The cloud-compile environment does make it easy to get up and running, but there are many things that a local build would make easier. For instance, the Bluetooth stack is always linked in even if it is not used, leaving less RAM and flash to the user. Or figuring out why calling snprintf() breaks everything. Hopefully they’ll release the local SDK soon.

Until then, the developers hang out on the inPulse forum and have been super helpful with debugging some of the getting-started difficulties.

A few weeks ago, NYC Resistor had quite a showing at the first Worlds Maker Faire in Queens.  We showed off a number of projects, including Ranjit’s MIDI Player Piano, Mr. Stabby, Raphael’s Twitchies, and Chris’s Cray-on-a-FPGA.  One of the new projects shown was the NYC Resistor Atari 2600 demo, thrown together the night before by me, Ben Combee.

The hardware you see there has a few homebrew components.  The console is an Atari 2600 Jr, the smaller version that was on sale in 1985 through 1990.  I’ve installed an AV modification from The Longhorn Engineer to get composite, S-Video, and stereo audio outputs.  The monitor is an older 21″ Dell unit that has composite inputs.  The demo was running off a Harmony Cartridge, a very cool homebrew development board done by people at the AtariAge website.  It lets you load a bunch of ROM images on a SD card and select which one to run at boot time.  For the Faire, I used a special autorun mode where it would always immediately start with the demo instead of showing the menu.

The app wasn’t written directly in 6502 assembly.  Instead, I used a great development tool called Batari Basic. It’s a BASIC language wrapper around the 2600′s hardware with prewritten display kernels. While you can’t do everything with it, it’s a great way to get an idea up and running on the system.

If you want to download the code or the binary to run in your 2600 emulator, it’s part of the NYC Resistor github depot along with many of our other projects.

What better way to spend a hot, humid Sunday Brooklyn afternoon than checking out Buzz-A-Rama, a 1960′s era slot car parlor in Kensington? Inside this unassuming storefront are 4 or 5 large twisting tracks, where children and adults race cars about 3 inches wide by 6 inches long, much larger than the matchbox-sized slot cars I played with as a kid. Amateurs like us use slow cars rented from Buzz. The pros, however, bring their own custom lightning-fast cars and controllers, and they are quite serious about them.

The car chassis are cut from lightweight aluminum composite using electrical discharge machining. Motivation is provided by high-performance brushless DC motors. Wheels and tires are made of special sticky, heat-resistant rubber, with a set of chemicals and rituals for cleaning and warm-up before a big race.

The lightweight plastic body can be either an aerodynamic wedge shape that directs airflow up, forcing the rear wheels down for better traction, or a more traditional scale model of a production muscle car. Super-cool retro body styles are available as well.

The controllers are also semi-custom built, and are adjustable by the operator to conform to his or her desired level of aggression in acceleration and braking.

You can buy the cars as ready-to-run products, but many racers customize theirs and/or build their own from the ground up, choosing the best components, and tweaking them for the best performance. The cars we saw were mostly made with components from Koford Engineering, and the controllers were from DiFalco Design, although apparently there are other companies serving this market as well. The fastest ultra-light cars we saw cost as much as $500.

Buzz has a good stock of generic aluminum and brass bar stock, motors, electrodes, dremel bits, lubricant, etc., behind the counter, so this could be a handy resource for local hobbyists and hackers building other electro-mechanical gadgets as well.

Buzz-a-rama is only open on weekends, and it is closed for two months in the summer starting tomorrow, but if you get a chance, stop by and check it out. It’s worth the trip:

Buzz-A-Rama
69 Church Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11218-3791
(718) 853-1800
View in Google Maps

Some more photos are in my Flickr Buzz-A-Rama Set. You can read more about Buzz-A-Rama at nytimes.com and kensingtonbrooklynblog.com

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.

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/2010/03/01/march-madness-march-1st-app/ http://www.nycresistor.com/2010/03/01/march-madness-march-1st-app/#comments Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:04:28 +0000 Matt http://www.nycresistor.com/?p=2549

So, the folks over at Fubar Labs made a challenge to themselves and anyone else who wants to participate. Basically, write one program every day throughout the month of march. Any language, any function, but be creative. I doubt I can keep up the entire month, but it sounds like a really fun way to expand ones coding horizons and do some neat stuff. So anyways, here’s my first code for March Madness.

For my first madness script, I wrote a quick script to grab the most recent posts made to pastebin.com and grep their contents for any references to passwords. Then I display the URL to the posting and the line that matched. Pretty simple, and pretty fun. Watch what you put in those pastebins kids.