Dino Dai Zovi’s Birthday cake at the NYCResistor Party

Encrypted with Dino’s PGP key to say Happy Birthday

Play or Die

So here’s a quick preview of the LED Array Jacket. I’m pretty excited it’s managed to light. Currently I am redesigning the driver circuit and boarduino to work with non-solid core wiring and to be more elegant and clean. But I thought this might wet your appetites.

There are two new classes here at NYCR!

Wind Micropower Workshop

Harness the wind for under $10! Using the most basic components, you too can gather electricity from a light breze. We’ll cover some of the basic ideas involved in generating power from wind, and we’ll each build a simple generator that will power a small light or charge a battery. Let’s start saving the world!

1 1/2 hours

Ages 10 and up welcome

Taught by Raphael Abrams. June 7th

Graceful Motor Control

It is not that hard to achieve graceful motion with a big motor. It just takes a small handful of common electronic components and a slightly larger handful of electronic tricks. We’ll learn about H-bridges, pulse width speed modulation, large transistors, servo feedback loops, electric braking, analog to digital converters, and more. Some understanding of the Arduino microcontroller is helpful, but not required. (If possible, please bring a laptop and an Arduino.)

Taught by Raphael Abram. June 8th

http://www.eventbrite.com/event/117134352

We hope you can come out and get some learnin’!

Some people think that LEDs need batteries to light up. We know different. LEDs just need cake. Alicia made this cake with wonderful LED candles. It was good.

This is a 256 LED matrix connected to Max7219 display drivers and programmed with an Arduino. Essentially, the Arduino is the brain behind the operation and the Max chip is the translator that speaks to the LEDs telling them when to turn on and off. The grid is separated into 8×8 quadrants and uses 4 Max7219 chips to drive a total of 16×16 rows and columns. The Arduino gives the Max7219 chip random numbers 0-8 to the digit and segment pins and lights up a single LED in its quadrant. By programming (with LOTS of help from Dino Dai Zovi) the display at 8000 one LED per grid lights up individually at a slow rate. Since computers don’t have opposable thumbs, this is where the human comes in. You get to put the legos where the computer instructs you to if you’re obedient. Once the computer has created its sculpture you can set the display to 3 or 4 and make it blink really fast turning it into a mesmerizing machine! Or a chandelier if you turn it upside down. You can also program patterns in the code rather than randomizing it, imitating lego instructions to build an object or map out visual data. The clear lego plates and bricks were found on ebay. The grid was built by Alicia Gibb and Becky Brauer. Look for upcoming LED Matrix building classes at NYCR.