A friend recently acquired a set of PUMA 260 / RP Automation robot arms and asked for some assistance in getting them running again.
Unfortunately they had been removed from their previous occupation with a set of wire-cutters. Some wires were labeled, most were not. But after a few weekends with a multimeter and some oscilloscope work, we have it running again. Read on for how to bring these arms back to life.
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Want to help those affected by Hurricane Sandy AND learn Arduino at the same time? There are still spots left in our Arduino 101 class tomorrow, and 50% of every dollar you spend for a class ticket will go towards hurricane relief efforts. Specifically, we’ll donate to Red Hook NYC Recovers unless we have some compelling reasons to go elsewhere, or divide the spoils: suggestions welcome in the comments. Red Hook is a neighborhood very close to NYC Resistor that was hit really hard, as you can see in the pictures. So join us for an afternoon of what we do best: learning, making, and sharing.
Do you want to be able to control software with interesting things?
Do you want to type text in a weird way?
Do you often need to type just the W-A-S-D and space keys?
Or do you have have ideas for repurposing devices to connect them to your computer? Then sign up for the USB Human Input Device class at NYC Resistor next weekend, 14 October 2012!
The class covers writing firmware for the AVR to implement various USB HID classes, such as keyboards, mice and joysticks, using both raw USB calls and Arduino libraries. Included in the class is a Teensy 2.0, a breadboard and switches for building a simple human input device that you can take home to prototype your next gadget project. Anything with buttons, pedals, sliders or knobs can be used to make an input device once you know how!
An in-depth look at DomeStar is long overdue. Now that it’s back from Maker Faire it’s time to take it apart and see how it works.
Find out more after the break..
Perhaps at your hackerspace you have a pile of “badass gauges” and want to do something with them. How about a USB interface, a laser cut enclosure and an RGB status indicator LED?
Read on for the vague construction details and some software to drive random DC current and voltage gauges that you might find.
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I’ve been wanting a sunrise lamp for a long time, but I’ve never found the perfect one. Having a free summer, and the knowledge that I would be starting my first full time job in many years in the fall motivated me to actually make something happen. I’m glad I had the whole summer because this project had several learning curves for me — it was my very first electronics project, my first chance to learn how to use a laser cutter, and my first foray back into programming in many years. It turned out to be a lot of fun, and I’m looking forward to doing more projects like this!
Read on for build instructions and links to code, patterns, and components.
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Adafruit is joining us along with the Raspberry Pi Foundation for our upcoming event on wednesday, and they’ve offered up an amazing Raspberry Pi shaped goodie backpack filled with accessories. The event is sold out but if you have an awesome project that you want to bring, and think you have a shot at winning this awesome prize from Adafruit, tell us about your project in the comments, and we’ll see if we can squeeze you in 
Here’s the info from Adafruit’s blog
How can you win? We’re going to give this away to someone at the NYC Resistor event on September 19th. If you’re going to the event you need to show up with a cool project made with a Raspberry Pi in some way. Ladyada and Becky will pick a winner, so make sure you show up with something really cool that shows what you can do with a Pi, looking for ideas? Check out tutorials and Pi day here.
We’re often asked if we can host an introductory programming class or two; in fact, our resident Classmaster informs me that a full 19.76% of former students report they’d be “very interested” in programming courses. To that 19.76% of a representative sample size, boy have I got an offer for you!
I’ll be teaching Introduction to Programming and Python on October 6th, right here at NYCR. What will you learn, as a vaunted and privileged member of the 19.76%? The goal is to bring you through the basics of programming using some practical and simple examples, to a point where you can begin to learn independently and take home some working code that you can customize and hack on.
What do you need to bring with you? In the hardware department, you need a laptop with some variant of UNIX, like OS X or Linux. If you’re a Windows user, a virtual machine running Linux will be fine. In the brainware department, I won’t assume any prior programming experience, but I will assume a moderate amount of familiarity with computers in general. You should know your way around your own system and be curious about how things work. This is designed to be a gentle introduction, not a crash-course for the impatient, but I’ll be happy to change the pace of the course as necessary.
Interested? Head over to the class page and sign up!
Questions? Feel free to get in touch with me at guy@gdickinson.co.uk
Photo via Flickr user steve caddy, because cats.
Vector displays are now mostly historical oddities — old arcade games like Asteroids or Tempest, or ancient FAA radar displays — which gives them a certain charm. Unlike modern raster displays, the electron beam in the CRT is not swept left to right and top to bottom for each row in the image. Instead the beam is steered to a point and traces the lines of the displayed image.
Most dual channel oscilloscopes have an XY mode in which the timebase is replaced by the second channel, so instead of a constant sweep frequency the two inputs to be plotted relative to each other. Generating low frequency analog voltages out of a small microcontroller with PWM through a low pass filter is quite common for adjusting the brightness of an LEd, but drawing complex shapes requires a faster way to change the voltage. One very easy way to do this is with an R-2R ladder DAC.
Read on for more details about how to build your own vector display hardware and some ways to draw shapes on your oscilloscope’s screen.
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While digging through dumps generated from the Apple Mac SE ROM images we noticed that there was a large amount of non-code, non-audio data. Adam Mayer tested different stride widths and found that at 67 bytes (536 pixels across) there appeared to be some sort of image data that clearly was a picture of people. The rest of the image was skewed and distorted, so we knew that it wasn’t stored as an uncompressed bitmap.
After some investigation, we were able to decode the scrambled mess above and turn it into the full image with a hidden message from “Thu, Nov 20, 1986“:
Read on for the reverse engineering details of how we recovered this and the other three photographs stored in the ROM, and some information about the Motorola 68000 era Macintosh.
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