NYC Resistor

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!

Read more

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!

Read more

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. Read more