NYC Resistor

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.
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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.

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.

I gave Zach several months to post this. And he hasn’t. I am not sure why, but it’s probably because he’s too busy advancing his skills and the capacity of his makerbots to take the time. A few months ago we hosted an amazing hackathon at NYC Resistor. During that event Bill was hard at work getting to grips with how the model 15-ro teletype, that I bought on e-bay for a dollar, operated.

It turns out the teletype only has 2 electromechanical parts… the motor and an actuator. Everything else is mechanical. All the amazing engineering and mind blowing beauty aside… that makes it very difficult to debug the device. So while Bill was struggling to step the device through it’s instructions Zach was building and perfecting yet another makerbot.

As the two of them conversed about their trials and tribulations Zach set out to use his makerbot to help Bill out. He designed a gear that bill could use to manually advance the main rotational shaft in the device and thusly step through instructions. Moderately simple little thing, but obviously designing these obvious components is… somewhat harder than it looks.

The amazing part to me isn’t the component made by zach, or the teletype. It’s the fusion of a prototyped component made using 2010 technology used to solve a problem on a 1930s machine. Just because two guys working on very different projects just happened to be sitting next to each other when they worked on their respective contraptions.

To me the image of this one new component on this amazing piece of antiquity is a thing of subtle beauty. A clash of cultures, a contrast of design, and a community of exceptional craft all there in one simple photo. Sometimes a thousand words simply isn’t enough to describe it.

Anyways, I hope you guys are seeing something as amazing here as I am.

The venerable and highly esteemed Mr Stabby. An orphan robot found upon the streets of new york, and eventually dropped off at NYC Resistor has found a home in our hearts. Luckily we’ve kept him thus far from plunging a knife into that home. We did however decide that since Mr Stabby means so much to all of us, that we’d celebrate his birthday. This year stabs got to take out a pinata shaped like a penguin.

Here’s a video of stabs showing us that even the surliest robots can sometimes find a home full of love, and support if hackerspaces are willing to open their doors to them.

Stabs… this one’s for you man.

(Updated: Photos from the event posted to Flickr)

When I went to boot up an old computer which had sat dormant since I moved in April, nothing happened. No lights, no whirring, nothing. I assumed it was a bad power supply, and left it for another day. Over the weekend my boyfriend got sick of seeing it out, guts exposed to the world, and threw a new power supply in it. Still no life. Then he pulled out everything but the motherboard, and it booted! Or at least, as much as a computer with just a motherboard can.

As he added each component in one by one, the culprit became clear without even having to power up the machine:

Not seeing it? Here, let me get a little closer:

This is, or was, my video card. A reasonably nice (at the time) 7600 GT. The most remarkable thing is that this is not the first time I've seen this happen to this particular card. In fact, it's the third. Two other friends of mine have had theirs blow capacitors as well. And a google search for "exploding capacitors 7600" brings up tons of results.

Goodbye, video card. We have these in a number of the computers in the house, including my main machine. I wonder how long it will be until the next one goes.

A lot of you folks may not know this but, I went to high school ( and graduated from there ) in Brazil. One of my friends from there currently is living in New Jersey. He’s been running powerlabs.org since high school ( probably earlier ). Sam has also just recently sold his soul to facebook here

Above is a video of him test firing a 100 KiloJoule rail gun. And I cannot stress this enough… THIS IS FREAKING AMAZING. Sam’s fairly famous so some of you may already know of some of his past exploits, but if not… by all means check his stuff out. Sam’s been inspiring me with his insanity for years.

I've been slowly (very slowly) setting up a small store at Resistor to carry electronics parts and prototyping tools, since there aren't any retail stores in town where you can pick up an Arduino RIGHT NOW. While ordering parts and figuring out where it will all go, I had a vision:

Vending machine full of components!

I've been surfing Craigslist and eBay, and while I'm not allowed to bring any new equipment into the space until we're all settled in post-move, it looks like a used vending machine can be found for $300 – $700 depending on what you're looking for.

One of the old school snack machines sounds just about perfect, but the one we found can only handle prices up to $3.95. Most vending machine hacks I was able to find were about getting free stuff out of them, not modding them to sell out of. Another fun hack which probably wouldn't be terribly difficult would be hooking it up to the net and letting people pay with PayPal or credit card.

I'll continue to hunt for the perfect machine, but in the mean time I'd love to hear about any vending machine hacks folks have seen or done. Because clearly what we need a robot who sells robot parts!

Happy New Year Blog Readers! We read your comments. I promise to try and blog more. If you want to see more than the occasional completed project… then so be it!

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