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!

Here’s an image of Adam working on our beloved “Mr. Stabby” on New Years Eve day. The video above was taken later that evening in prospect park. We’re pretty partied out, and like you suffering the bitter cold. But, I know I am eager to get back into the swing of things and try to knock out a few resolutions early this year.

And some video love:

I was also wearing my Makerbot Watch as a belt buckle with Mark Tabry’s awesome New Years Eve code on it.

A shot of the belt buckle:

Some video of Mark’s Code via Charles Edward Pax:

As usual there’s a lot brewing at NYCR. Along with my fellow blog posters I’ll try to keep you guys more in the loop.

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.

So at the end of last year and into the beginning of 2009, the folks at the extreme craft blog were soliciting for submissions for their 1000 ideas for creative reuse book. And since creative reuse is the very essence of hacking, I decided to submit my ( at the time new ) mp3 grenade project. It got into the book! So my idea is idea number 579 of 1000 fairly amazing ideas. Review and more after the click!

Now my review:

The one review on amazon.com gives it five stars, but the buyer laments that the title implied that it would be more instructional than it was. True, it’s definitely light in the extreme on instructions. But, at 1000 ideas, I can’t imagine just how much text based instruction you would actually be expecting.

I wouldn’t buy this expecting a lesson in design methodology. Hell I wouldn’t ask you to trust me on design methodology. But, that’s not where I see value in this book. To me, it’s kinda of a coffee table book. Something fun to look at, and somewhat inspirational. You can pick it up turn to any page and just see creative and unique ideas flow. For me, that’s of the utmost value. They say genius is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. Well, you can’t start on the remaining 90% without the first 10, so you may as well start getting inspired if you want to be a genius.

Anyways… the book is available from amazon here: Amazon.com I don’t make a dime off the book, and I still say it’s worth the purchase. But that’s just me. I also hate e-readers, so maybe you shouldn’t listen to my opinion. Think for yourself.

Bill, Alicia, Hilary, Diana and the Cake

NYC Resistor made a huge showing at Yahoo Open Hack Day NYC this year.  Team Makerbot showed up with the New York Toast, featuring their latest “Frostruder” prototype, an amazing attachment which turns the Makerbot 3D printer into a confectioner’s dream.  And in the spirit of edible technology, Alicia, Bill, Diana and Hilary gathered to create the “Delicious Cake.” The cake was, in fact, NOT a lie.

The Cake represents the sentiment – positive, neutral or negative – of a keyword as represented on Delicious.com, Yahoo’s social bookmarking service. The cake was made to look like the Delicious.com logo, and LED “faces” were used to indicate the sentiment. Hilary wrote the code for the sentiment analysis, Bill wrote the code that drove the Arduino controller, Diana soldered the LED faces, and Alicia assembled the electronics and decorated the cake itself.

You can see more of the cake at Alicia’s Flickr Stream or at Bill’s. We were also featured on CNN: http://bit.ly/ddNm3

Find out more at Diana and Hilary’s blogs:

Diana’s blog: http://fashionnerd.com/2009/10/yahoo-open-hackday-nyc/

Hilary’s blog: http://www.hilarymason.com/blog/yahoo-openhacknyc-the-del-icio-us-cake/

I bought these fantastic Apple In-Ear headphones for my iPod 80GB several months back for $79, and found that they worked well with my Macbook.  I’ve since moved on from both the iPod and the Macbook, settling on a Nokia n97 mobile phone.  I found that the Apple headphones don’t work with these devices naturally and distort the sound.

The small control pod in the cable may be changing the impedance presented to the amplifier in the mobile phone, but I do not know this and have not measured the impedance; i am speculating. However, when you squeeze the middle button of the pod, the sound becomes normal, so I suspect the impedance may be changed by activating the button.  Some in-line controls for various microphones operate in a similar manner, where an impedance change can signal a button press without requiring additional cabling or connectors.

These headphones have magnificent sound for playing compressed digital audio files, as well as uncompressed CD audio, and sport dual sound drivers in each headphone.  For the money sunk, and the fidelity provided, it would be daft of me not to try and get them working on the Nokia.  Bonus points for not hacking up the cable and removing the pod.

The solution was simple enough, if a little unsightly.  Tightly wind a metal tie-wrap around the center button of the control pod to force the impedance to remain at something that the Nokia would correctly drive. It’s easy, it’s reversible, and it only takes a minute.  Make sure you wind it very tightly, and it may require a little fudging to stay in the sweet spot to keep the button depressed.

This has been tested with the Nokia n97 using the in-line Nokia-supplied remote audio control.  The combination of the two lengthy cables makes for a very long cable run between the mobile phone and the earbuds, and really, that should be sufficient to pack the Nokia in your briefcase or a low pocket, provided you can manage the microphone placement should you actually care to take a call.

This should also work (but has not been tested) on the Nokia n810, and any other device that expects to see “plain vanilla” headphones. I once had a gym with a treadmill that refused to accept the Apple headphones, so I suspect there are a large number of audio devices that have some sort of incompatibility with this product.

Good luck!

(An exact copy of this post was made to my personal blog at http://wwward.typepad.com; it’s too short to really make two versions, but it is useful info.)

On the way home from work today I stopped by 269 Electronics in Chinatown. From the outside this looks like a typical Canal Street junk store, with a big spread of knockoff watches, perfume, mp3 players, etc. on display. However in the back they have a special counter area devoted to electronic components. One wall was covered with electrolytic capacitors and diodes in blister packs. The clerk I spoke to said they had other discrete components, like transistors and resistors, in an array of drawers in the back. He pulled out an NTE catalog for me to look through when I asked them what they stocked. They also had bins of various loose connectors, copper-plated PCBs, perf board, battery holders, multimeters, Velleman kits, and lots of other odds and ends on display. Bottom line: it’s not exactly Fry’s, but for hardware hackers in New York City, it’s definitely on the short list of places to get parts when you can’t wait for an overnight delivery from DigiKey or Mouser. Check it out yourself sometime:

269 Electronics Inc.
269 Canal St.
New York, NY 10013
(212) 625-0405
Open Monday-Saturday 10:00 am – 6:30 pm

More photos after the break:

It looks like Phil Torrone of Make Magazine posted some of his own pics last year on the Make Blog.

Last weekend we had a party to celebrate Awesome August. I am sure some folks missed it. That really sucks for them, because it was probably the best party we’ve ever thrown. A great deal of awesome was experienced by all. Awesome beer, awesome projects, and awesome events… all with awesome people. I’ve tossed up a time lapse of the event. Sorry about the flag getting in the way near the end, that’s just bad planning on my part. I promise to do better next time, in fact next time pretty much everything will be better. So look forward to the the next event, it’s going to be epic.

Justin had a really fun project setup using the Spooky Box from last Halloween. Check out the twitter feed from the party here. Source code for this project is coming!

The Lite Bright also built by Justin, ( and a team of dedicated individuals ) was there and enjoyed by all. Here is a shot of it early in the evening before people went crazy with it.

Charles had a station set up with approximately one kilogram of Crayola Model Magic. Guests were encouraged to grab a hunk and make something of their own.

Charles also brought a Wimshurst machine he picked up at a school physics lab and repaired. In this shot we study the effects of electricity on George Washington’s head.

Also making an appearance was Ranjit’s automated piano working together with Eric Skiff’s Monome to produce a really awesome interactive piece.

Jared posted his Photos : Here

We also had a live DJ, and a few other projects I failed to mention. I know I missed a lot. Send me a note and I’ll add it.