NYC Resistor

My parents recently visited my aunt and uncle in china, and while there they picked up some rather nice high end watches direct from the factories. Most of the time, my father prefers his digital, and only wants to wear the watch he picked up in china when he’s in more formal dress. Thing is, the watch he bought is autowinding, so it’s always either dead, or at the very least really wrong every time he puts it on. So he asked me to come up with a crazy contraption to wind his watch. This is what I came up with:

Check out the pipetastic mad whack watch winder.

Learn about the Reware project, see how to easily install GNU/Linux and Pd on your Palm TX, and see some example projects.

We’ve been working since July on making it easy to hack old devices and run new software on them. Coming soon, a image for running Pd, Python, and Lua programs on PDAs, as well as a HOWTO for making Pd patches for 1-5G iPods. The key idea is to turn old PDAs, mobile phones, etc. into something like an Arduino, where you can easily upload your own code to the device.

For more info, check out our Reware dev site

Devon Jones needed a robot to do his bidding and so he made a computer controlled dremel. He found an instructable by Stuart McFarlan and created it using a mix of aluminum stock, an inexpensive wood called MDF, and skate bearings.

It now works so he’s going to be able to use the subtractive process, which means he can take away all the parts of the material that are not his thing, to create whatever he can imagine.

I’m publishing a video everyday. Catch them all over on my blog.

Ever wanted to grow grass in your cubicle? I did. But the grass kept dying. So I made a custom grow light out of LEDs, and now I have the nicest lawn on my block. Build photos, schematic, sourcecode, etc. are on the project page.

The Spooky Box is a simple interface for Processing that consists of 3 knobs and 4 buttons. There are two versions, an Arduino based hardware one which doesn’t exist yet, and a software emulator which I just finished. There’s also an accompanying Processing library that works for both which is ridiculously easy to use.

If you’re looking for a simple, generic UI for your Processing apps, consider trying this out. I’ll be releasing more info as the hardware gets put together.

PS. The skull image in the background there is CC licensed, and can be found here.

I do all of my hacking at the NYC Resistor hacker space, and I’m proud to announce the most recent fruit of my labors: the Sanguino. This board is an Arduino-compatible board that boasts 4x the memory (64K!) 4x the RAM (4K!) and 12 more pins (32 IO pins!) Its all open source and you can get one from the RepRap Research Foundation for only $25. Sweet!

Oh, and I managed to get this footage last night. Check it out.

Sanguino: Arduino’s Big Brother from Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken on Vimeo.

Last night as we were preparing for the party, Eric broke out his camera and took this cool video of my LED Cylinder project. Thanks Eric!

More details on the project, including schematics and sourcecode, are available at http://dclausen.net/projects/ledcyl/.

If you want to learn how to make projects like this, check out our classes! We have several electronics and LED classes coming up, including Introduction to LEDs next weekend and Building LED Displays the weekend after that. Also you should come to our Party / Art of the Game Gallery Show tonight (Saturday, July 26, 2008) to see this project and a bunch of other cool things on display.

In this video:

Devon Jones with his modification of “Third Hands ++” from Ryan Straughn

Video by: Eric Skiff (behind the camera / CC-BY music).

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.