So, once in a while, I wake up feverish in the middle of the night, screaming “CLAMPS! I NEED MORE CLAMPS!” Oh, you too, huh?

It’s your lucky day! Or rather, this coming Sunday, April 7th is your lucky day, when NYCR and our good friends at the Industry City Distillery will be having our first-ever garage sale. We’ll be selling all kinds of hardware oddities, including:

• Clamps!
• Hand tools!
• Power tools!
• Strange, unidentifiable tools meant for neither hand nor eye!
• Microscopes! Boroscopes!
• Audio equipment! Video equipment! Audiovisual equipment!
• Files! Floppy diskettes! Raw steel! Cooked steel!
• A vertical mill! (U-buy, U-move!)
• Clamps!
• Files!
• Electronic bits! Non-electronic bits!
• More VHS recorders than you’re prepared to buy!
• aaannnddd moooooorrrreeee!!!

We’ll be having the sale in beautiful Industry City, Brooklyn, in association with the Industry City Distillery, manufacturers of incredible spirits. Come by to buy! Come by to browse! Come by to meet amazing people!

The sale starts at 11:30 AM, Sunday, April 7th and continues until sunset, at which point we’ll just start calling it a party. The address is 33 35th Street, Brooklyn, NY, just two blocks downhill from the 36th Street Station on the D, N, and R trains. It’s just one stop on the N train from NYCR.

See y’all Sunday!

(We’re not kidding about the mill.)

Ranjit Bhatnagar, Nick Vermeer and William Ward of NYC Resistor have teamed up with Brooklyn Ballet to create a mixed-medium performance involving captivating dancers and realtime stylized visualization of their choreography.

Performances Feb 28, March 1, 2, 8 & 9 at 8PM, with matinee performances March 3rd and 10th at 4PM for the early-to-bed crew.

Actors Fund Arts Center, 160 Schemerhorn, a 10 minute walk from NYC Resistor!

$25 ($15 for you poor students or distinguished seniors!) tickets here!

(Tools used will be discussed later, I’m going to get some sleep. — wwward)

We are pleased to announce that Shelby Arnold, paper engineer and pop-up artist extraordinaire, will be joining us for Make-Along:  Paper Edition.  Be driven insane by the non-euclidean forces at work as Shelby Arnold demonstrates her ability to create a third dimension from a sheet of, what was until now, merely two dimensional paper. She bears the mystifying mark of the POP UP BOOK and she will share her bent, nay, folded visions with YOU.

But have no fear!  Behind these folded spaces and twisted geometries of this hidden universe is a delightful workshop in paper crafting.  Open your mind to origami, kirigami and book binding in a comfortable and fun setting, for only they will protect you from the horrors of plain old flat paper.

Make-Along:  Paper

Saturday, February 23, 1 to 4pm, $10 (Includes materials, tools and treats)

Click here to reserve your seat.

Happy Year of the Snake! We’re celebrating the first full moon of the new lunar year with a lantern festival! We’ll meet in Prospect Park on Sunday, February 24, to share our homemade lanterns. And to get ready, we’re holding a lantern-building workshop on Saturday the 23rd at NYC Resistor!

lantern photo by jnthnhys

Lantern-Building Workshop
Saturday, February 23, 5-8PM
$10, for adults (though you’re welcome to make laterns for your kids, and kids can attend on Sunday)
Please RSVP through eventbrite.

Build colorful, safe glowing lanterns with LEDs!

We’ll supply: construction materials and tools, bottomless box of light-emitting diodes, soldering help.
You bring: ideas, 9 volt batteries, colorful tissue papers or plastics, transparent jars/jugs/boxes, portable objects you’d like to decorate with lights, colorful blinky toys, etc.

Lantern Festival
Sunday, February 24, 5:15pm-sunset
$FREE, open to all ages
No RSVP necessary

Prospect Park, Brooklyn
Picnic area just north of Picnic House (enter at Prospect Park West and 5th Street)
[park map, google map]
The closest subways are 2/3 at Grand Army Plaza, and F at 7th Av.
If you have trouble finding us, call Ranjit at 646-270-2694.

Bring your handmade lanterns to show off, whether you made them at the workshop or at home! We’ll have hot cider and s’mores ; bring some snacks to share if you like. As it gets dark we’ll parade our lanterns north to Grand Army Plaza.

Please: NO FIRE! Don’t bring any lanterns that use candles, flames, or heat. Electric lamps, LEDs, flashlights, and glow sticks are all good ways to make fire-free lanterns.

As midnight approached this New Year’s Eve– as champagne bubbled from uncorked necks and we all prepared for the coming year in various postures of revelry or bleak resignation– I grappled silently with the pivotal question of our time: “How awesome are robots?” The answer is of course that robots are completely awesome. That settled, I resolved to build one robot a month for the duration of 2013.

Much to the chagrin of Brooklyn’s legion of artisanal slow-cooking egg-boilers, January’s robot is a an automaton for preparing soft-boiled eggs for human consumption.

This was a junkbot, assembled from various scraps that have ended up in the space over the years. Expert junkspotters will note:

• The heating element and thermistor from a trashed mini-espresso machine
• One 250mL beaker of questionable provenance
• Some off-brand extruded aluminum
• Skate bearings
• A haunted steel counterweight
• Lots of lasercut acrylic and delrin
• Some chunks of 4×4 sliced out of the loft supports from the original NYCR location
• A couple of analog servos and a DC motor from the junk drawer
• One half of a L298 from a driver board I designed in 2005
• Some relays from sharesville
• A button from a reflow oven
• Random bolts, plywood, etc.

The whole shebang was controlled by a Teensy 2.0 and powered from a bench supply (except the heating element which was run off of 120VAC, which is why the lights keep dimming during the video).

All the code and CAD files are in my Github repo, as usual. Special thanks to Charles Pax for donating the boiler from his busted coffeemaker, Eric Skiff for providing the tunes for the video, Nick Farr for a last-minute game-changing special Club Mate delivery, and everyone at NYCR for indulging my little robot habit.