Happy Year of the Snake! We’re celebrating the first full moon of the new lunar year with a lantern festival! We’ll meet in Prospect Park on Sunday, February 24, to share our homemade lanterns. And to get ready, we’re holding a lantern-building workshop on Saturday the 23rd at NYC Resistor!

lantern photo by jnthnhys

Lantern-Building Workshop
Saturday, February 23, 5-8PM
$10, for adults (though you’re welcome to make laterns for your kids, and kids can attend on Sunday)
Please RSVP through eventbrite.

Build colorful, safe glowing lanterns with LEDs!

We’ll supply: construction materials and tools, bottomless box of light-emitting diodes, soldering help.
You bring: ideas, 9 volt batteries, colorful tissue papers or plastics, transparent jars/jugs/boxes, portable objects you’d like to decorate with lights, colorful blinky toys, etc.

Lantern Festival
Sunday, February 24, 5:15pm-sunset
$FREE, open to all ages
No RSVP necessary

Prospect Park, Brooklyn
Picnic area just north of Picnic House (enter at Prospect Park West and 5th Street)
[park map, google map]
The closest subways are 2/3 at Grand Army Plaza, and F at 7th Av.
If you have trouble finding us, call Ranjit at 646-270-2694.

Bring your handmade lanterns to show off, whether you made them at the workshop or at home! We’ll have hot cider and s’mores ; bring some snacks to share if you like. As it gets dark we’ll parade our lanterns north to Grand Army Plaza.

Please: NO FIRE! Don’t bring any lanterns that use candles, flames, or heat. Electric lamps, LEDs, flashlights, and glow sticks are all good ways to make fire-free lanterns.

As midnight approached this New Year’s Eve– as champagne bubbled from uncorked necks and we all prepared for the coming year in various postures of revelry or bleak resignation– I grappled silently with the pivotal question of our time: “How awesome are robots?” The answer is of course that robots are completely awesome. That settled, I resolved to build one robot a month for the duration of 2013.

Much to the chagrin of Brooklyn’s legion of artisanal slow-cooking egg-boilers, January’s robot is a an automaton for preparing soft-boiled eggs for human consumption.

This was a junkbot, assembled from various scraps that have ended up in the space over the years. Expert junkspotters will note:

• The heating element and thermistor from a trashed mini-espresso machine
• One 250mL beaker of questionable provenance
• Some off-brand extruded aluminum
• Skate bearings
• A haunted steel counterweight
• Lots of lasercut acrylic and delrin
• Some chunks of 4×4 sliced out of the loft supports from the original NYCR location
• A couple of analog servos and a DC motor from the junk drawer
• One half of a L298 from a driver board I designed in 2005
• Some relays from sharesville
• A button from a reflow oven
• Random bolts, plywood, etc.

The whole shebang was controlled by a Teensy 2.0 and powered from a bench supply (except the heating element which was run off of 120VAC, which is why the lights keep dimming during the video).

All the code and CAD files are in my Github repo, as usual. Special thanks to Charles Pax for donating the boiler from his busted coffeemaker, Eric Skiff for providing the tunes for the video, Nick Farr for a last-minute game-changing special Club Mate delivery, and everyone at NYCR for indulging my little robot habit.

Have you ever wanted to wear an Arduino on your wrist and tell the time with a giant LED matrix? Then you’ll love this three hour class at NYC Resistor that I’ll be teaching on February 9th. During the class you can learn how to solder through-hole components as we put together the Adafruit Timesquare DIY watch kit, and afterwards we will extend the watch firmware to add a new feature to the watch.

This class is a great introduction to soldering and some advanced embedded programming techniques. The coin-cell powered Timesquare watch isn’t exactly a normal Arduino and is very CPU limited, so techniques for limiting power consumption, waking up from deep sleep with interrupt handlers, low voltage brownout detection and some inline AVR assembly will be discussed. If you just want to learn to solder and have a very stylish wristwatch, you don’t have to stay for the walkthrough of the firmware. The included watch band is both comfortable and sleek, making your finished project something you’ll actually want to wear.

Included in the class price for every student is a pre-programmed Adafruit Timesquare watch kit and an FTDI cable for re-programming it (a $49 value). You’ll need to bring your own laptop with the Arduino IDE installed to flash new firmware onto the device if you are staying for the advanced portion of the class.

Click here to buy tickets at eventbrite!

Thirty years ago in 1983 the first tablet computer was released: the Tandy / RadioShack TRS-80 Model 100. It ran for weeks on four AA batteries and gathered quite a following. Despite the $1099 ($1399 with extra 8-KB of memory) introductory price tag, features like the built in 300 baud modem with acoustic couplers made them very popular with reporters in the field, and the built-in BASIC programming language (written by Bill Gates himself!) made them easy to adapt into various custom applications. Over six million were produced and as a result, inexpensive, used Model 100s are readily available now. Amazingly many of them still work perfectly and there is a somewhat active Club100 fan club.

I bought one that was non-functional for $20 with the goal of replacing the 80C85 motherboard with a more modern AVR or ARM CPU. While this particular motherboard had failed sometime ago due to bad capacitors, the LCD and keyboard were in perfect working order. Thanks to the combination of the age of the design, the system’s low original clock speed (2.4 MHz) and its 5 V logic make it simple for modern hardware to drive. Moore’s Law also means that the entire motherboard can be shrunk into a PCB with almost zero chips other than the MCU. Read on for what is involved in building a new brain for your Model 100. Continue reading »