NYC Resistor

Did you know that you can cut letter press relief or intaglio plates on the NYCR laser cutter? The laser cut acrylic holds a decent edge and is far less expensive than copper plate. Here is a short guide to how to make engraved invitations using the intaglio process:
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Have you ever wondered how to make sense of hexdumps?

e1a02000e5d00000 e3500000012fff1e
e3a00000e2800001 e7d23000e3530000
1afffffbe12fff1e

Or been curious to know what exactly does a bxeq lr instruction mean in assembly?

If so, then you should sign up for the introduction to assembly programming and reverse engineering class. You can learn assembly programming and machine architecture using reverse engineering techniques on your own code. In this class we will write code, compile it into an executable and then disassemble it to learn about registers, stacks, branches, function calls and argument passing, structs and other common idioms.

Experience with any programming language is required; the examples in the class with be in C, with dissassembly into ARM assembly. Bring your own laptop with arm-elf-gcc and associated binutils installed to follow along.

When you plug in, or join the wireless network at NYC Resistor, you are joining a very special network. We’re one of the first networks to join with Agora Link. The North American arm of a global Research network that is linking hackerspace’s internal networks together into one awesome collaborative mesh. We’re tied in with the ChaosVPN in Germany, and as of this past weekend we have 50 registered ( not necessarily active yet ) end points. Anyways, if you are interested in this sort of thing, you can read more about that here:

• Agora Link Homepage
• ChaosVPN Wiki
• Periodically updated network map

What does this get us? What’s the payoff? Well, we’re just starting to get to work on demonstrating that. First up on deck is a plan to host an international CTF competition using hackerspaces and other labs as the meeting points for teams. So look forward to more details on that in the near future. But, it won’t stop there. We’ve got a bunch of really great ideas that should be popping up over the next year.

I gave Zach several months to post this. And he hasn’t. I am not sure why, but it’s probably because he’s too busy advancing his skills and the capacity of his makerbots to take the time. A few months ago we hosted an amazing hackathon at NYC Resistor. During that event Bill was hard at work getting to grips with how the model 15-ro teletype, that I bought on e-bay for a dollar, operated.

It turns out the teletype only has 2 electromechanical parts… the motor and an actuator. Everything else is mechanical. All the amazing engineering and mind blowing beauty aside… that makes it very difficult to debug the device. So while Bill was struggling to step the device through it’s instructions Zach was building and perfecting yet another makerbot.

As the two of them conversed about their trials and tribulations Zach set out to use his makerbot to help Bill out. He designed a gear that bill could use to manually advance the main rotational shaft in the device and thusly step through instructions. Moderately simple little thing, but obviously designing these obvious components is… somewhat harder than it looks.

The amazing part to me isn’t the component made by zach, or the teletype. It’s the fusion of a prototyped component made using 2010 technology used to solve a problem on a 1930s machine. Just because two guys working on very different projects just happened to be sitting next to each other when they worked on their respective contraptions.

To me the image of this one new component on this amazing piece of antiquity is a thing of subtle beauty. A clash of cultures, a contrast of design, and a community of exceptional craft all there in one simple photo. Sometimes a thousand words simply isn’t enough to describe it.

Anyways, I hope you guys are seeing something as amazing here as I am.

The Madagascar Institute is an awesome art/build/make/catch-on-fire space and we’re about to move a lot closer to them. This video made by the Motherboard team is a great introduction to them. Make sure to check out their classes!

You’ve dreamed of it… now it exists. Credits to Adam Cecchetti, Astera, and Eric Skiff.