NYC Resistor

Here at Resistor, other people’s technology cast-offs show up on our shelves.  Occasionally we take one down and give it a good thrashing to see whether or not it’s useful.  This time, we have an animation controller manufactured by the strange little company “Gilderfluke” that specializes in robotics controls for the sort of thing you might see at a kid-themed pizza restaurant.  Given that they have an Orlando office, they probably also do business with the big D.

The Gilderfluke device is a heavy I/O, heavy serial process logic controller.  It has facilities for time synchronization between devices, and the company sells add ons to facilitate passing audio over long distances without losing sync as well as driving DMX-equipped theatrical devices.  It’s clearly overkill for Resistor, but only in the sense that we aren’t planning to build a theme park, because otherwise we *love* overkill.  Why use a class 2 laser when you have a perfectly good class 4 available?

This PLC is interesting both because it is a new rabbit hole of neatness, but more importantly because it has lots of LEDs.  Although we are in the age of the organic LED display, where rich text and video can be placed on near about anything - the romance of the LED, the sheer eye-candy of monochromatic lighting will continue to delight us for years to come.

Will keep you updated as we dig out the RS422 adapters and start talking to the world inside these things.

SLED in Cyan color with diffuser

The “SLED” or, Second Life LED (just one L for clarity) is available as an open source, CC’ed design. It is a USB-attached, Arduino-based RGB “lamp” which can be used to indicate various information from the PC, or simply used to brighten a room with a little color.

My goal in building this device, in conjunction with my friend and colleague Andy Fundinger, was to provide a visual indication of activities within the popular 3D online world of Second Life. Many of our friends and peers had business activities within Second Life and wanted a convenient way of keeping an eye on trends or specific events without remaining logged in or while they were away from their desk. While SMS and e-mail notifications are easy to do, none were so reassuring as simply having a blinky light to tell them when something needed attending - such as a vendor or a shop proximity sensor.

The code for the Second Life component is under construction, but you can build this device today! Either grab the Arduino sketch below and load in your own Arduino developer board, or for a smaller design, run off a few of these customized PCBs and enjoy a little SMD soldering. In the future, I intend to build a batch of these for my less technically-inclined Second Life friends, but for now, I’d like to share it with the community. I’ll flesh out the information as time progresses, but the files provided should allow anyone familiar with Eagle, Atmega and Arduino to get their own done for whatever purpose.

SLED circuit boards in the nude

The design is released under a Creative Commons license.
The schematic, board, and bill of materials are here.

The Arduino sketch is here.

(This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Arduino team, but they’re awesome!)

Jack Bauer apparel for the modern Cyber Terrorist.

Don’t get caught wearing this in Boston, or on line for your next flight. But the latest in hacker apparel makes sinister use of the ageless dark art of LED matrices. Anyways I am bringing my jacket to defcon to announce to the world, that the gauntlet has been thrown down… who will be first to legitimately drop a Pants Status: Pwned.

In terms of Technical Details, the Jacket uses a MAX 6952 LED array driver and is being written to via SPI.. and a boarduino.

I’m making a really tiny board and I thought I’d share a picture of it. It’s a little tiny data gathering widget with an RGB LED on it for feedback. There’s an AVR there too. It’s 1.25″ square. I think it looks nifty!q

Since when were hackers the best thing happening in Avant-garde music? SINCE ALWAYS DUMMY!

This event is curated by Speaker Synth artist Lesley Flanigan.

excerpt:
This Wednesday night at the Tank, a group of amazing people come together for a night of performances based on amplification. It will be AWESOME! A really special opportunity to see such a great, eclectic group of performers all in one night. For my part, I will perform both my latest speaker feedback instruments and Bioluminescence with Luke DuBois. So please come out and join us all for drinks, fun, and sound!

~Lesley

now come check out this awesome show at the tank in NYC at 7:00 pm

Map:

View Larger Map

Play or Die

So here’s a quick preview of the LED Array Jacket. I’m pretty excited it’s managed to light. Currently I am redesigning the driver circuit and boarduino to work with non-solid core wiring and to be more elegant and clean. But I thought this might wet your appetites.

This is a 256 LED matrix connected to Max7219 display drivers and programmed with an Arduino. Essentially, the Arduino is the brain behind the operation and the Max chip is the translator that speaks to the LEDs telling them when to turn on and off. The grid is separated into 8×8 quadrants and uses 4 Max7219 chips to drive a total of 16×16 rows and columns. The Arduino gives the Max7219 chip random numbers 0-8 to the digit and segment pins and lights up a single LED in its quadrant. By programming (with LOTS of help from Dino Dai Zovi) the display at 8000 one LED per grid lights up individually at a slow rate. Since computers don’t have opposable thumbs, this is where the human comes in. You get to put the legos where the computer instructs you to if you’re obedient. Once the computer has created its sculpture you can set the display to 3 or 4 and make it blink really fast turning it into a mesmerizing machine! Or a chandelier if you turn it upside down. You can also program patterns in the code rather than randomizing it, imitating lego instructions to build an object or map out visual data. The clear lego plates and bricks were found on ebay. The grid was built by Alicia Gibb and Becky Brauer. Look for upcoming LED Matrix building classes at NYCR.

LED Simple Solution #1 - Use in place of missing barrette.

My good friend Chris McDonald made this extra-great, 2-axis drawing machine for doing time-lapse photography.

Here’s the info from his personal website vanita phone company: 

Gertrude uses two stepper motors to move an LED in a very high resolution x/y plane. The movement of the LED is photographed using exposures usually between 30 and 90 seconds. Gertrude can either be programmed to “print” a design automatically (”Christopher & Daniil”, the Hell Yup!: Scanlines shots) or controlled live via a joystick (Open&Close portrait series). 

II: Christopher & Daniil not talking (pt. 2 in a series of 2) 

Hell Yup!: Scanlines 3 (Self-Portrait)
 

Learn how to use shift registers as Dave explains his LED oscilloscope project at NYC Resistor’s bi-weekly Microcontroller Study Group.

UPDATE:

We’ve all gotten excited about this project, and Dave has agreed to open up his code and document everything, but needs a little help creating the schematics, etc. Zach ‘Hoeken’ Smith of RepRap will be giving a demo on Eagle at the next NYCResistor Microcontroller Study Group meeting so we can create the schematic, and get started documenting this whole project from start to finish!

Soon after that, we’re looking to create a kit for this project to make it easy for people to duplicate it at home. It’s a great project for learning audio processing, breadboarding using arduino, shift registers, and how to make and use an LED matrix. That, and it’s just cool. I want one of these for my desk.