NYC Resistor

When we got the Lazor at NYCR, Adam discovered that Moleskin’s have PVC (not good) in the leather and lazering such a thing could be harmful to your health and might even harm small puppies! (Gasp!)

I wanted to Lazer the NYTimes “T” into my notebook so I had to take an alternate route. Very simply, I just cut out a “T” on the Epilog Lazor and then pressed it in a vice between a couple of pieces of wood for 20 mins or so. Looks pretty neat if I may say so myself. “Fire the lazzzzor!”

I found Matt Shlian’s work while surfing Youtube. I’m a big fan of paper engineering and after seeing the way he makes paper move, I had to know more! - Link

Make:NYC Meeting 9 happened yesterday at NYCR. I’m still compiling a more robust breakdown of the event, but I thought I’d toss out a sneak peak…

And as always… big thanks to all the resistors for putting up with us!

Another Tuesday Night meeting, just after bloody MAKE:NYC gore and just before the phooky phenom on twitter.

Marc de Vink posted a nice video demoing the Danger Shield I created over at MAKE Blog. This little board was designed for teaching people how to program for the Arduino and if you sign up for classes, I’ll teach you how to program an Arduino using one of these little guys.

Here at Resistor, other people’s technology cast-offs show up on our shelves.  Occasionally we take one down and give it a good thrashing to see whether or not it’s useful.  This time, we have an animation controller manufactured by the strange little company “Gilderfluke” that specializes in robotics controls for the sort of thing you might see at a kid-themed pizza restaurant.  Given that they have an Orlando office, they probably also do business with the big D.

The Gilderfluke device is a heavy I/O, heavy serial process logic controller.  It has facilities for time synchronization between devices, and the company sells add ons to facilitate passing audio over long distances without losing sync as well as driving DMX-equipped theatrical devices.  It’s clearly overkill for Resistor, but only in the sense that we aren’t planning to build a theme park, because otherwise we *love* overkill.  Why use a class 2 laser when you have a perfectly good class 4 available?

This PLC is interesting both because it is a new rabbit hole of neatness, but more importantly because it has lots of LEDs.  Although we are in the age of the organic LED display, where rich text and video can be placed on near about anything - the romance of the LED, the sheer eye-candy of monochromatic lighting will continue to delight us for years to come.

Will keep you updated as we dig out the RS422 adapters and start talking to the world inside these things.

Thanks to Justin’s hard work we have an internet party line link to two teletypes at NYCResistor.

Here’s some video of us watching the live feed of teletype traffic coming in from the internets.

I take *tons* of documentation photos as I build the electronics I design for RepRap, and sometimes I get a bit bored and like to take random macro shots. Sometimes they turn out really neat, showing you a perspective or detail you just cant get as a human. Today was one of those days:

and

and

all turned out pretty well. make sure you click through for the big versions!

I’m happy to release the v1.3 of the Sanguino software. This is a compatibility update for the Sanguino. I’ve fixed some minor compatibility issues with some of the core Arduino libraries.

I’ve tested and fixed the following libraries:

* LiquidCrystal - for controlling LCD displays
* Servo - for controlling servo motors

I’ve fixed, but not tested the following libraries (need circuits to test on):

* Wire - for talking i2c to various things
* Ethernet - for doing ethernet communication

Anyway, you can download it from SourceForge or check out the Sanguino homepage.

After attending the first Processing study group, I set out to use Processing to generate files for my favorite thing… laser cutting.

I needed something to package my Tinysaurs in, and got tired of having to manually draw out the box template every time I wanted different dimensions. So I wrote a program to take the dimensions I want and spit out a box. They end up looking like this:

Processing has a PDF export library which I use to generate the template in PDF format, which Corel Draw is able to read. Processing also has an SVG export library, but I didn’t have much luck getting it to work. I’m looking into using Python instead of Processing, because it apparently has a nice DXF library, but so far Processing is working pretty well.

If you want to check it out, the box generating program is available in the NYC Resistor SVN repository. Which is public, hooray! The code is only vaguely commented, but it should be pretty clear what it’s doing. Maybe. Leave questions in the comments if you have any!

Of course you don’t need a laser to cut these out, and xacto knife would work just fine. But… I have a laser so I use it. You can get the pre-generated PDFs of boxes in various sizes on my blog, http://www.kellbot.com