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!

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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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.

 

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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The Raspberry Pi foundation is stopping at NYC Resistor on their Hackerspace Roadshow. Come and join us for an evening with talks and hands-on time with the Raspberry Pi. Special guests from Adafruit will be joining us as well, with some of the awesome stuff they’ve designed for making your Pi even more tasty.

The Raspberry Pi is a tiny, insanely cheap mini computer. It combines a 700mhz ARM processor, a GPU, hardware h.264 decoding, and a bunch of GPIO pins for interacting with the real world, all for about $25. The Pi was designed with students in mind, but there’s tons of potential for interactivity, robotics, and art when you can literally afford to build the computer into your installations. Continue reading »