NYC Resistor

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.

As part of my on-going quest to fill my apartment (and hackerspace) up with semi-working 1970′s supercomputers, my effort to revive the Cray-1 supercomputer needs your help! Through the grapevine, I managed to get my hands on a genuine backup disk pack of the once-thought-extinct Cray Operating System (COS). Using my homebrewed disk reader I was able to make a copy of the disk, and the folks over at the internet archive (thanks Jason!) were kind enough to host it for me. Now is where you, kind reader, come in! Help me reverse-engineer the file system so I can recover the actual operating system files and take a step closer to towards booting this awesomely-useless machine!

Download it and get hacking!

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.

Using Darrel Tan’s Programming the ATTiny10 instructions and a SOT-23 breakout board by Raphael, I was able to flash one of these very small MCU chips. Given the small package, these programmable devices can be dropped just about anywhere on a circuit that a transistor would be used.

Unlike Tan, my FTDI breakout cable does not have DTR, so the reset pin on the chip needs to be pulled low manually to put it into programming mode, and the pinout adjusted. Full instructions after the break…
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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.

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.
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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.