NYC Resistor

When life gives you busted up old LCD panels, make… lightboxes! I constructed this one out of the CCFL backlight from an old laptop LCD I found around the space. It gives a nice, even white light, and runs off a 9V at about half an amp.

The inverter for the backlight was long gone, so I replaced it with one of these inexpensive CCFL inverters from MPJA.

A little hot glue and acrylic cement later, we have a perfectly serviceable lightbox. Now, what ever could we use one of those for?

We’ll let this bit of awesomeness speak for itself Check out all the Resistor cameos!

Learn more here!
http://arduinothedocumentary.org/

At a recent meeting I had a chance to sit down and check out Bill’s “Simple serial display” which, true to it’s name, is simple, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting one badly! Watch the vid to see it in action, and check out Bill’s earlier post for more info!

Music: Eric Skiff, Resistor Anthems – HHavoc Intro

This weekend PMF and I cleaned an IBM 129 Card Data Recorder and were able to fairly reliably punch cards once we were done. When we started it would frequently jam during feeding, mis-feed during the punch, and not cleanly stack the cards in the output bin.

Most of the problem was thirty years of dust, card fiber and grime built up in the mechanisms. The output hopper was full of it and needed a good cleaning to reliably pick up cards into the output stack:

Click for more inside

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.

Looking for a unique gift for a friend or loved one? Why not consider giving them the gift of learning at one of NYCR’s great classes.

We have some really great classes in the upcoming weeks, click descriptions for more info:

December 18 – FIRE THE LAZZZOR ORNAMENTS* -
Last chance to make an ornament or small gift for a relative:
January 14 – FIRE THE LAZZZOR -
Our standard handy rapid-prototyping LASER CLASS
January 15 – NYCR Arduino/Soldering 101 -
Make your own Arduino and Learn to Program it!
January 22 – Soft Circuits -
Learn to make soft, flexible and washable electronic circuits embedded right into common textiles! We’ll cover conductive thread,…
January 28 – Intro to Adobe Illustrator -
Are you curious about how to make vector graphics?…

*Also, as an FYI– the material covered in the Dec 18th LAZZZOR CLASS will be the same overview as in our standard FIRE THE LAZZZOR classes, and your attendance will qualify you for future laser use at our laser nights.

Tonight at 21:00 eastern (02:00 UTC) Make:Live’s Hackerspace roadshow II visits NYC Resistor and other hackerspaces. From NYC Resistor you’ll see Alicia, Catarina and Shelby’s electronic art book, Mimi’s RFID blocking wallets, Charles’ TV-B-Gone gun and other cool projects by NYCR members.
Read more

Adam and I upgraded Hexascroller to control 5 m of Adafruit RGB LED strip through a spare serial port connected to a Teensy 2.0 that drives the strip via SPI. Now when a new message is displayed, the accent lights switch to a bright flashing mode to attract attention, then they will return to soothing, slow color changing mode.

Click the “Read more” to see additional photos of the installation and setup. Read more

There will be no craft night this Thursday, November 24th, on account of some ridiculous human “h0l1d4y”. Do not show up at NYCR that night, as all our Greeter Drones and HappiBots will be offline.

New Work City is a fantastic co-working at Broadway and Canal in manhattan. If you’ve never checked out a co-working space, it’s a lot like NYC Resistor, except instead of gathering in the evenings to hack on projects, it’s a place for freelancers, entrepreneurs, and anyone else who works for themselves to get stuff done.

It’s also a great source of community and connections, and as New Work City starts ramping up their own classes, we’re doing a bit of cross promotion. We think many of the classes will be interesting to the NYCR community!

Upcoming Classes at New Work City:

• Winning Negotiation in Three Steps
• Supercharge your WordPress Site
• Website Bootcamp for Creative Professionals

Check out their full class roster for dates, and sign up for their newsletter to get updates!