I looked at an L-shaped loft today on the 5th floor of a commercial building on Bridge St. between Willoughby and Fulton Mall in downtown Brooklyn. The rent is $2200/month with a 1 year lease and no fee. It is 900 sf (my measurements) with high ceilings and good light. The location is extremely convenient to trains and also happens to be close to a good hardware store, a Radio Shack, and Polytechnic University. The surrounding buildings are mostly commercial and low-rent retail, although this is a gentrifying area and some luxury condos are being built up the street. Rent includes heat 9-5 M-F but nothing else. There is a small bathroom down the hall which is shared with 2 other tenants, but there’s no shower or kitchenette. Since this is the first space we’ve really seen, I can’t say how it stacks up in terms of value, but it certainly seems like a viable option based on our criteria. More photos after the jump…

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Sorry for the late posting, but this show is tonight.  Its a really rad exhibition of cool tech projects from the ITP students at NYU.  Lots of fun artsy type Arduino projects and other stuff.  I went there last year, and it was a good time and I had lots of cool conversations.  This year should be good as well.

Info:

A two day exhibition of interactive sight, sound and physical objects by the student artists of ITP

This event is free and open to the public – no need to RSVP

Sunday, December 16 2-6 PM
Monday, December 17 5-9 PM

ITP @ 721 Broadway, 4th Floor

http://itp.nyu.edu/shows/winter2007/ 

I like Tetris; who doesn’t? The rules are simple, and it’s a good test of strategy and speed without eye hurting graphics. I’ve played it on a few Nintendo handhelds, my PC, and on Sony’s gaming consoles. The people over at MIKONTALOLIGHTS in Finland developed a platform to play it on a building by using the windows as light pixels and a cell phone as the controller. Check out the video (hosted on CollegeHumor):

It’s similar to a project from Blinkenlights and the CCC based in Germany. Their project also used a mobile phone to control lights (windows) on a building, except they were playing pong and uh, MIKONTALOLIGHTS used color. The Blinkenlights and CCC projects are still cool as they’ve done a lot of animated graphics on the side of a building. Check out their gallery if you haven’t already.

This is by far one of the more interesting things I’ve come across in the past few days; the Gainer PSoC Development Board. It’s open source hardware and it is programmable in Flash, MAX/MSP and Processing. This is from the site:

Gainer is an environment for user interfaces and media installations. By using the Gainer environment, the user can handle sensors and/or actuators with a PC on various programming environments such as Flash, Max/MSP, Processing and so on. The basic concepts are:

• The user can use it for creative work from prototype stage to final output stage.
• Using a breadboard allows the user to learn by mistake.
• The user can build their own I/O module from components.
• The user can choose a configuration from various configurations (software and hardware).
• Open source software and hardware.

It’s freshly out the gate and available from SparkFun for the same price as our friend the Arduino. Looks very promising, especially when you factor in the Flash environment. We’ll have to get a couple and try them out.

This has been around for a while but I’m just getting around to posting about it. The Resistor iPhone App is good for on the go Hardware Hacking. The typography is annoying and unnecessary (comic sans?!) but it’s useful and easy to use.