We’re throwing a Halloween pumpkin-hacking party! We’ll be making pumpkins light up and react to touch sensing or maybe motion. We’re also thinking up pumpkin-y desserts featuring cooking those gourds with lasers and fire. Who’s in?
Bring your own pumpkin, with the seeds already scooped out. (We’ll have an extra or two, but you’ll have much more time to enjoy circuitbending your pumpkin if you come prepared.) Please also bring your own LEDs and any project components you might want to use. We’ve got plenty of soldering equipment.
Are you interested in book arts? Have you always wanted to bind your own books? Or design pop-up books? Did you know we now have an intaglio printing press at Resistor? Guess what! We’re having a super-mega DIY Book Arts workshop on October 8th from 1pm to 5:30pm where you can learn about ALL those things!
Class cost is $125 – this includes your materials. We’ll teach you some different book binding techniques, cover a bunch of paper engineering mechanisms, and even give you an introduction to printing with the Intaglio press (one of its abilities is letterpress-style embossing!). Not bad for a single afternoon!
As part of our investigation into the properties of Jello– we realized that both jello and fruit, are conductive. To create the Jeltone, we fabricated several flavors (tangerine, coconut, greentea, etc.) of Jello in key-shaped slabs. Each key was then perched atop a food safe sterling silver pin connected to an Arduino microcontroller (hidden conveniently underneath the piano’s lasercut acrylic base). To complete the circuit, and play a noise, a metal utensil can be connected to the Arduino, or it can be played with gloves enhanced with conductive thread. Bare hands can also play the jeltone by touching both a key and the piano’s case at the same time. Alternately you can also make the Jeltone using slabs of fruit.
If you’d like to make your own, you can get the project files, code and instructions from Thingiverse.
Catarina Mota, Alicia Gibb and Shelby Arnold built a speaker made entirely from copper foil tape on cardstock + a magnet. They’re testing it with the JelTone edible piano. The speaker’s design comes from the High-Low Tech Research Group at MIT.
The tape is applied to the paper in a coil-shaped pattern. When connected to the output lines of the JelTone with alligator clips, then suspended over a magnet, the speaker produces a soft hum. This sound matches the tones that the piano produces when hooked up to a real amplifier, though it’s a lot softer and noisier. Continue reading »
Today 10/3 Laser Night is cancelled due to a fire two weeks ago in our Laser. Parts were delayed at the supplier, and arrive tomorrow. We should be back up for Craft Night this week, check here for status after tomorrow. Continue reading »
I’ve been inspired by the Lasersaur project to try building an XY table for laser cutting, Makerbotting, and light duty milling. The brackets, motor mounts and carriages are all 3D printed on NYCR’s Makerbot Thing-o-matic. Today I was able to put most of the pieces together for a dry fitting and found a few bugs — the carriages have too much play and will bind if pulled from the side, so the pull-pull belts will need to be moved to the inside of the rails, which will require all the carriages to be redesigned. The good news is that the printed teeth to engage the belt are well positioned to secure the belt under the rails without any additional hardware.
Are you jealous of all your designer friends who can whip up Illustrator images in an instant for the laser, for their website, for a client? Curious just what Illustrator can do? Come learn with Caitlin Sherman, a friend of Resistor who has been using Adobe Illustrator consistently since entering the fashion design industry four years ago.
Today 9/26 Laser Night is cancelled due to a fire last Monday in our Laser. Rest assured we’ll be back in order by next week. We’re just awaiting the repair parts, which we expect to have in, in 3-4 days. Continue reading »
Come learn how to create websites with Alexis this Saturday. She’ll walk you through step-by-step and get you creating your Web 2.0 foundations in no time using an open source code editor.