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.

As you can see from our time lapse of the NYCR stage and dance floor (actually just our workshop floor without tables) we had a great time. Thanks for being awesome friends of NYCR. Hope to do it again, bigger and better, soon.

Be prepared. The next one will be even more awesome.

Also search for tag NYCResistor on flickr for more awesome photos.

Wow, just – wow.  Patrick Jean posted this Apr 7, so it’s fairly fresh.  Amazing NYC videography-meets-CGI. Watch it in full-screen, my WordPress-posting-fu is still in training (it is also 02:00 UTC-4.)

PIXELS by PATRICK JEAN.
Uploaded by onemoreprod. – Independent web videos.

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)

So we had our first Craft Night this week in the new space. We moved in Saturday. So in less than a week you can see how far we have come. I am pretty excited about what we’re going to be able to do.

Last weekend we had a party to celebrate Awesome August. I am sure some folks missed it. That really sucks for them, because it was probably the best party we’ve ever thrown. A great deal of awesome was experienced by all. Awesome beer, awesome projects, and awesome events… all with awesome people. I’ve tossed up a time lapse of the event. Sorry about the flag getting in the way near the end, that’s just bad planning on my part. I promise to do better next time, in fact next time pretty much everything will be better. So look forward to the the next event, it’s going to be epic.

Justin had a really fun project setup using the Spooky Box from last Halloween. Check out the twitter feed from the party here. Source code for this project is coming!

The Lite Bright also built by Justin, ( and a team of dedicated individuals ) was there and enjoyed by all. Here is a shot of it early in the evening before people went crazy with it.

Charles had a station set up with approximately one kilogram of Crayola Model Magic. Guests were encouraged to grab a hunk and make something of their own.

Charles also brought a Wimshurst machine he picked up at a school physics lab and repaired. In this shot we study the effects of electricity on George Washington’s head.

Also making an appearance was Ranjit’s automated piano working together with Eric Skiff’s Monome to produce a really awesome interactive piece.

Jared posted his Photos : Here

We also had a live DJ, and a few other projects I failed to mention. I know I missed a lot. Send me a note and I’ll add it.

First some credits on the video:

Alicia Gibbs: Camera Woman
Adam Mayer: Sound and Special Effects Engineer
Raphael Abrams: Hacker 2
Charles Pax: Hacker 1
Matt Joyce: Himself

Special thanks to Nick Farr, and NYCResistor for their continued support

www.hackersonaplane.info
Read more

That’s a long title. I know. But filled with awesome. Fatman and Circuit Girl is an internet video series that is the culmination of the combined efforts of the indomitable Jeri Ellsworth, and the 8-bit era superstar Fatman (George Sanger). Earlier this year Fatman and Circuit girl did a live show at Notacon. I was running a hackspace at Notacon with the help of Mitch Altman (who is a hell of a guy). However, the night before Notacon we were running into some problems with our mode of transportation to Notacon. Our man with a van so to speak was without the proverbial van. So I called everyone I knew who wouldn’t mind a call at 11 at night and might be willing to shuffle off to Cleveland at a moments notice. This basically was a very very short list. But as luck would have it… Nick Farr came through with a car ( a now infamous vehicle known amongst the hacker world as mr black, though very nearly mr pink ). We still needed a backup driver. So I called Noah, figured this sort of event would be right up his alley. And sure enough he was excited to go. So he joined NYCR members Rose and myself on a trip to overcast Cleveland. We had a great time, and Noah was able to show off his augmented reality rig at Fatman and Circuit girl’s live show. Anyways this is the video from that event.

Oh the stories we have… and the videos that follow.

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.

Read more