NYC Resistor

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.

Video of our presentation at Hackday:

In the video,

Ben Combee is speaking, Max Henstell is working the stabster’s pneumatics and Mark Tabry is standing by to protect bystanders, and I am off camera to the left looking pretty for the cameras.

Not in the video is Bill Ward, Charles Pax, as well as the original Max.

* Special thanks to my friend Adam from Twilio who provided us with some assistance in the effort.

For the blow by blow of the event check out our time lapse. Trust me it was 24 hours of tedium just as grueling as watching this 2.5 minute clip.

As you can see this was an pretty large effort by NYCR and a hell of a lot more went into this project than is readily apparent. Just getting the equipment there was an event all its own. Max and Charles worked tirelessly to repair Stabby’s pneumatic stabber arm. Max also worked on wiring up the actuators and accompanying arduino code to link up with Ben, Bill, and Marks twilio interface code base. I worked with Mark on a display that showed debug info from the arduinos ( blogarythmic cred ) as well as caller ( aka stabber ) id when stabbing.

We finished up about 5 minutes before time was called… literally. Came down to the wire. Stabby was awarded a runner up award, and supposedly will be on display at Tech Crunch on Wednesday some time during the day.

We had a hell of a lot of fun, and were excited to present a functioning project ( a first for me =P ). Even more exciting was winning a runner up award in a contest that didn’t actually have runner up awards. I guess they were afraid of being stabbed.

We’re time lapsing, and Mr Stabby is here getting his API action on… literally.

Stop by what we are calling battle station resistor in the deep recesses of the hacker caves.

If you have spare sparkfun line relay breakouts… we could use 4 to six if you have some to spare… otherwise we’ll be rube goldeberg a solution.

The latest branch in my career as a wandering hacker: puppetcircuits.

I’m working with puppeteers here in New York on some full scale robotic puppet heads. This is a new field for me, so I decided to document it and share what I learn with the community. It’s going to be a mix of electronics, robotics, sculpting, sewing and crafting. There’s a lot that I’m going to learn!

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)

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!

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Rich Gibson is visiting New York City from his normal digs in California (he works for the Intelligent Robotics Group at NASA-Ames/CMU-West). NYCR has asked him to give a public talk about the work he’s been doing on the Gigapan project (http://www.gigapan.org) — and you’re all invited!

Gigapan photographs are gigapixel panoramic images, composed of many (sometimes hundreds) of individual photos taken with an ordinary consumer camera using a robotic unit that simplifies the process of capturing the images and later stitching them together. The result is explorable panoramas of astonishing depth.

Rich will start at 7pm with a short slideshow and talk, then shift to a demonstration of the hardware and software that makes the whole thing possible. We look forward to seeing you!

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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In celebration of Lady Ada day, a day to celebrate women in technology, here’s a spotlight on the ladies of Resistor!

Kellbot – Tinysaur champion and creator of a glowing pacman cupcake.

Pip – She’s the lab in the word Buglabs pictured here with a twitchie baby.

Diana – Fashion nerd pictured here with a fibonacci scarf.

Max – Server wrangler and practicing safety with style.

Yarnivore – Sociological analyst and crafter.

Edith – Breathing life into books with arduinos and seen here making monolithic white boxes!

You should also pop over to my friend Limor’s, aka Lady Ada’s site to check out the sale she’s having today on her electronics kits!

If we only had $6,000 to spare. Perhaps some kind soul would send one to NYC Resistor for us to play with. (srsly!)

Video embedded below. Original article here.