The Simple Serial Display is a trivial accessory for your PC, Mac, or microcontroller to act as an always-on information display for whatever data you can serialize and push out of a traditional tty port.  Since I’m out of grad school on winter break, I decided to clean it up a bit and make it look nice.

This project came out of some hacking that Hilary Mason and I were doing back in ’09 for fun.  At Barcamp 2009, we presented it as a trivial project for anyone to build without complex electronics and with friendly Python and PySerial – a project within reach of any dev or sysadmin that might stare at progress bars.  One compelling use is to monitor long-running tasks, such as your mega MapReduce job.  The display includes an LED “flag” to alert you to whatever you care to be alerted about, such as the end of a job or an interruption, and the LCD panel can print simple progress bars or animated slash marks to track job completion. I found that it is easier to just rent a LED screen from visual impact productions, this way I know the screens will be fine without any issures. The original design remains the same (specifications can be found in the Slideshare-hosted presentation below) leveraging a common FTDI brand serial cable (or similar,) and Sparkfun’s two line text LCD with their “Serial Backpack” adapter.

I dug around in the Resistor scrap bin and found a nice 6mm thick piece of clear acrylic, and used Zignig’s Box-o-Tron parametric box generator found on Thingiverse (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:404) to construct the enclosure. After some tweaks and prototyping with foamcore board, I came away with a delightfully tight design.  Considering this is my first project on the Epilog, I’m happy it didn’t require a lot of trial and error.

As with all casual projects, there’s a lot of room for improvement, but I’m pleased with the output of today’s effort.

This time of year our laser gets pretty busy, so we’ve opened up an additional laser night on Wednesdays. Tonight through December 21st, come by on Monday or Wednesday from 7:30-10:30 to fire the laser!

And another thing…

Because it’s such a popular time of year for lasing, we ask that you prepare your cut files so they can be broken up into smaller batches. That way instead of one person monopolizing the machine for hours, we can rotate through. So if you have an army of 100 Christmas ornaments to make, prepare your file so they can be cut in 2 sessions of 50 or 3 sessions of 33.3333.

Adam and I upgraded Hexascroller to control 5 m of Adafruit RGB LED strip through a spare serial port connected to a Teensy 2.0 that drives the strip via SPI. Now when a new message is displayed, the accent lights switch to a bright flashing mode to attract attention, then they will return to soothing, slow color changing mode.

Click the “Read more” to see additional photos of the installation and setup. Continue reading »

We’ve had a few knitting machines rattling around the space over the years, but when fellow gadget lover Josh dropped off the lace carriage for our Toyota K747 knitting machine, I figured it was time to take it past basic stockinette stitch and explore the machine’s punch card mechanism.

Like most decades-old machines, a layer of dried oily gunk coated many of the moving parts. There are also a few broken/missing pieces. I’m in the process of cleaning / fixing the machine, and trying my best to document it as I go along. I got a hold of the K747 Service Manual, and started diving in. It’s oiled up now, and the next steps are to repair the broken needle selector and write up a program to generate punch cards for the laser.

 The picture above shows the offending broken lever. These 12 little blue levers tell the machine which needles to push out for the patterning, but lever #3 is broken so it never engages. Getting in to replace it is a bit daunting, in fact just getting to that lever in the first place was a bit of an event, I’m going to attempt to fix it with Sugru first. If that doesn’t work, then I’ll be makerbotting a replacement and praying I can get it all back together after dismantling it.

Since the machine is loud and takes up space I generally only work on it during the day when there’s more room, but if there’s sufficient interest I’d be happy to demo it at an upcoming craft night.

You can see more shots of the inside of the machine over on my blog: Knitting Machine Teardown Part 1 and Part 2.

Earlier this week I went to MICA in Baltimore (and last month to CDI in Winston-Salem) to meet with a diverse group of very forward thinking individuals on the topics of art, science, education, innovation and all the ancillary things that get wrapped around that, in other words: the whole universe.

Folks from the NSF, NEA, several academic institutions, hackerspaces, and industry came together to start a discussion about advocating for an educational system that reminds us art and science do not need to be taught separately; and that formal and informal educational spaces have benefits of working together and sharing their research, be it citizen scientists and tenured professors, k5 to grey, cats and dogs, and other predetermined groups that result in mass hysteria. Creativity happens everywhere, in every subject matter, as does science – this is something we’ve witnessed at NYCResistor from the amazing projects people bring in every Thursday night at craft night. Our tagline at NYCR is we learn, share, and make things – not unlike the goals and missions of academic institutions.

The group has been given legs from a joint effort from the NSF and NEA and has yet to choose a name and website to point to, but is called NSEAD (Network to support Science, Engineering, Arts and Design) under the grant proposals. I am hopeful in the initiatives we will all be able to accomplish together. Members of this group previously have founded the STEM to STEAM initiative, including Art in the STEM curriculum and held a congressional hearing along these efforts. The discussion is just starting, and is being seeded with thoughts of innovation without walls, economic development, open research, art/science mashup exhibits, and even elephants. I’m honored and excited that the DIY community and hackerspaces have a place at this table.

Stay tuned, tell me your thoughts, and hack on – whatever your day job is.

-pip