NYC Resistor

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!

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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

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: Read more

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.

When it comes to hacking, I tend to enjoy practical projects the most.  The Arduino is like physical computing “duct tape” that gives one the ability to “duct tape” things that need constant attention or action. If you need a plant watered, or your fish tank pump monitored, or your bikini-clad friends to set off a musical instrument with just their bodies then the Arduino is just the tool you need. So what about fire?

Close-up of the UV TRON Sensor Tube

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So during the Thursday craft night we received a request from one of the hackerspace folks for some time lapse videos of the space over a 24 hour period. They are working on a project that will no doubt be stupendous and magnificent. However this spawned a quick project.

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Ok maybe it’s a little smaller than life-size, but it’s a hella fun way to play Katamari.

More details on how it’s put together can be found on my blog, kellbot.com

Widget and Hans stayed up til 2am hacking up some iPod sequencers at NYC Resistor. We are using pdPod on iPodLinux. You can hack your own iPods too, as part of the re-ware project, we are trying to make it easy: http://re-ware.org

Thanks to Bre Pettis for his camera work.