Trossen Robotics has just announced that they are shipping RoboBuilder kits. They are the pieces and parts that make ‘Humanoid Robots’. Price ranges are dramatically different, but it looks like a fun intro for people that are just getting farmiliar with robotics and electronics, or for someone excited to hack a humanoid…. but, be warned, ‘be nice to the robots, they’ll be in charge one day’.
I’m sorry. I had to do it. I murdered the Fail Whale… I don’t know what came over me.
I’ve had a number of inquiries about the rules of the soldering championship all set to happen at 7:15 at M1-5 this Tuesday.
Here’s the details that have been revealed so far.
With solder irons blazing, and the power of molten metal at their finger tips, New York City’s electricity enthusiasts and hardware hackers will connect components to complete circuits for the glory of being the fastest soldering gun in NYC.
On stage and under hot lights, contestants will complete an electronics kit in the shortest time possible while still maintaining the integrity of the circuit. Who will be New York City’s soldering champion? You’ll need to be there to find out!
Doors open at 6:30. Competitor check in until the competition starts promptly at 7:15 PM.
$30 entry fee to cover the cost of the kit. It’s a really cool kit! (Undisclosed so you can’t practice on it!) We will have power strips available.
Here are some bonus details.
1. The kit you will be assembling is a through-hole kit that an experienced solderer can complete in less than 30 minutes. It’s a cool and practical kit that you’ll actually use. (Next year, with more lead time, I want to create a kit that has an surface mount component just to be evil.)
2. There will be a trophy for the fastest and I’ll have a few NYCResistor T-shirts to give out for the first 3 people there to check in.
3. You can use any soldering iron that you bring. (Next year, I may make you use a crappy super cheap iron just to be evil.)
4. No helping hands. (There had to be at least one evil rule!)
I am really looking forward to this competition. See you at M1-5 on Tuesday for check-in and may the best solderer win!
This event is part of Ignite, a geek night that Brady and I founded. There will be awesome presentations after the championship that you should stick around for.
By 1997, The Chaos Computer Club in Berlin was growing rapidly and local groups started popping up all over Germany. In Cologne, the media center of Germany, a CCC group called C4 started. After some time, the folks at C4 realized that many of their club were getting old and lame. A cunning and subtle plan was hatched to involve more young people in the group, C4 developed a hacking contest called U23 for those under 23 years old. Each year the challenge switches between hardware and software and the young hackers develop cooperative teamworking skills alongside technical skill-building development. One year, the challenge was to make a robot to follow a line and read a barcode at the end of it and another year, teams built a chat server that tunnels over UDP. U23 has since been adopted by other teams to involve young people and keep CCC fresh.
In 1998, the Chaod Computer Club’s annual meeting, called Chaos Communication Congress, moved to a beautiful building with a domed roof. There were rooms for talks and interpreter cabins but the presence of asbestos provided a minor speed bump. By this time, the Internet had entered popular culture. The dot-com boom was ramping up and CCC grew from about 250 people to 1500. There is a regional group in every city and because the first meeting of the CCC happened on a Tuesday, all the groups meet weekly on Tuesdays. While Tuesday CCC meetings are for members only, many regional branches have a public night for talk and discussion either weekly or monthly on a Thursday.
In 2001, Wau Holland, the founder of CCC died rather suddenly of a brain tumor. It was the 20th birthday of CCC and an exhibition and historical interpretation center had been planned. Despite the setback of losing their founder, many special things happened that year including, blinkenlights.
I met Tim Pritlove to hear about the history of Blinkenlights. Blinkenlights was an installation set up in the teacher’s building in downtown Berlin. It was a matrix of windows that could be lit up to create an array of 18 x 8 lights. I’ll talk more about this amazing project in a future blogpost.
After the 2003 Congress, it was decided to open up the group and make it more international. The format of Congress switched to mostly English presentations and overseas speakers were invited.
Hacker camping conferences in Europe were started by the Dutch early on in 1993 and they followed that four years later in 1997. The CCC got inspired and started their own camp on an alternate four-year cycle in 1999 and 2003 and 2007
These days, there is so much stuff going on with the CCC. It has grown from its small roots to become established in Hamburg, then Berlin, and then it has spread with smaller and wonderful regional groups around the country. Jens mentioned that he likes to be surprised by the individual groups projects.
Currently the CCC is becoming more involved in political struggles. Jens reflected that it seems that every week, a CCC member is working with parliament on one or more issues that effect freedom, digital rights, and the crossroads of technology and lawmaking. For many in the CCC, fighting for your rights and hacking are inseparable.
Some of the current issues facing the CCC are pointing out security problems with RFID passports, the unfairness of discriminatory visa waivers and other security problems. The CCC is generally considered by average Germans to be the last line of defense for freedom and civil rights in Germany in the digital age.
This is the last post about the history of the Chaos Computer Club, but the story doesn’t end here. After returning from camp, some new friends and I started NYCResistor to have a hacker space of our own locally. A special thanks goes out to Nick Farr, the Johnny Appleseed of hacker spaces who organized the wonderful Hackers on a Plane trip. Not only did he organize a super affordable trip to go to defcon and the Chaos Communication Camp, but after camp he organized a tour and myself and a wide-eyed bunch of hackers visited C-Base, Metalab, Das Labor, C4, Entropia and Netz Laden. Each community has it’s own way of cultivating community around hacking.
Most of the info for this post came from notes from conversations I had last year with Jens Ohlig and Tim Pritlove at Chaos Computer Camp. Make sure to read the first and second and third blogposts too!
From December 27th to 30th, the 25th Chaos Communications Congress will meet again and they have 6 different categories in the call for participation. It is a wide and varied world of hacking presented at the Congress. It is the place to be in the world on those dates. I can’t wait to go and see all the cool projects, people, and presentations this winter in Berlin!
Last night as we were preparing for the party, Eric broke out his camera and took this cool video of my LED Cylinder project. Thanks Eric!
More details on the project, including schematics and sourcecode, are available at http://dclausen.net/projects/ledcyl/.
If you want to learn how to make projects like this, check out our classes! We have several electronics and LED classes coming up, including Introduction to LEDs next weekend and Building LED Displays the weekend after that. Also you should come to our Party / Art of the Game Gallery Show tonight (Saturday, July 26, 2008) to see this project and a bunch of other cool things on display.
Online software services generally get a bad rap. Nobody says anything about them unless they break, and when they do everyone throws a fit. I’d like to do the opposite of that today and say that Eventbrite has done something that has made me really happy: They listened to me and made a change that makes my life much easier.
As you may know, NYC Resistor uses Eventbrite as a way to manage our classes by allowing us to put them online, sell tickets, and just generally make it a nice little system that works smoothly. The one gripe I had was that they previously lumped Draft and Live events into the same tab. Now as you can imagine, since we’re offering classes, we have quite a few Draft events, and quite a few Live events at any one time.
On a whim, I contacted their support team in hopes they would fix it. I sort of assumed that it would fall into some dusty bin of suggestions from users never to be seen again. Instead, I got an email less than 2 days after I contacted them saying that they had not only considered my suggestion, but implemented it as well!
Bravo Eventbrite, bravo.
Holy crap this is sweet. More info on their website.
levelHead v1.0, 3 cube speed-run (spoiler!) from Julian Oliver on Vimeo.
When: July 26th 2008. 9PM
Where: NYCResistor (397 Bridge Street, 5th floor)
What: Party and Art Show!
How Much: $20 cover. (open bar)
Why: Fundraiser to keep us going!
Check out some of the artists we’re featuring!
Adam Parrish
Andrew Y Ames
Zach Vitale
Jacob Joaquin
Chris Basmajian
Aaron Meyers
Bill Ward
Andy Fundinger
Aaron Meyers
Jason Nelson
We’re not always hacking at NYC Resistor: sometimes we play with exothermic reactions that turn liquids into solids! Here is a timelapse of me casting some RepRap Extruder MKII parts to play with.
Smooth-on Timelapse from Zach 'Iowa' Hoeken on Vimeo.
NYCResistor’s Gian Pablo Villamil is working on a really interesting project with panoramic Video in New Orleans. He can’t tell us what the project will do, who is involved, or if space aliens really exist, but the few photos he has on his site look pretty amazing and he has written about some solutions to technical hurdles associated with the piece. Stay tuned for more on the project! As per Gian’s request, this blog will self destruct in 5, 4, 3, 2…
