Andrew O’Malley
Hacker in Residence @ NYCResistor, Summer 2010

Hi, I’m Andrew O’Malley, a Canadian new-media artist with a formal background in Electrical Engineering.  Back in July, my wife, Deborah, and I relocated from Ottawa, Ontario to NYC for the summer, and the kind folks at NYC Resistor graciously opened up their space to me as “hacker/artist in residence” for July and August.

Before arriving in NYC, I spent a busy spring developing a line of decorative, animated light boxes built into wood and acrylic enclosures.  Some were based around LED screens from Sure Electronics populated with retro video game animations and random drawing algorithms:

While others featured diffused grids of LEDs driven with sinusoidal and random algorithms:

I set up a shop at Makers Market and have been selling these boxes on-line since the spring of this year.  A primary goal of my time this summer was to further this line of fixtures with an open-source clock kit featuring multiple animations for displaying the time both literally and abstracted. Working with NYCResistor was a perfect pairing for this project thanks to their extensive electronics resources/tools, and fabrication tools – Tool Town and the laser.

Before setting to work on the clock project, however, a great “distraction” arrived in town in the form of The Next Hope.

The conference and energy of all the attendees was inspiring, and really deserves a blog post of its own.  In short, it was a great way to get my gears going. Even the badge was memorable:

I didn’t get a chance to do any badge hacking, but was thoroughly impressed with Adam Mayer’s “doppelganger” firmware which cloned and rebroadcast the id of nearby badges . . .

Back at Resistor headquarters, my clock screens had yet to arrive so I turned my attention to a few other random projects.  The first was hacking the Disco Chip, a break-out board from Rachel’s Electronics in NYC.

The Disco Chip takes a mic or line input, and drives an RGB LED to the low, mid, and high frequencies of the input audio, most likely to drive keypad backlights in mobile phones.  I’d like to take advantage of all that small footprint filtering to control more LEDs, or anything else for that matter, so I worked on sampling the LED drive signals into the analog inputs of an Arduino.  Thus far I’ve had average results, and need to spend more time finessing the system. I’ll soon be writing a detailed post about this for my project blog.

In the meantime, an Ottawa-based deadline was creeping up on me so it was onto another project, and thankfully some of my LED screens had arrived:

The above piece was for a charity art auction called “Portraits of Bluesfest 2,” and featured two 24×16 LED screens displaying random Tweets mined from Twitter.com during the Ottawa Bluesfest in July.  I won’t repeat the whole back story on this one, which you can read here. This project proved a great opportunity to finally fire up NYCR’s laser cutter and make something pretty.

By this time, I’d accumulated all the parts I needed to get started on the clock project, so I soldered up a prototype:

Adafruit has a nice tutorial on the DS1307 RTC chip, so I had a simple clock up and running pretty quickly.

Next it was back to the laser cutter to fire off a nice little enclosure:

Here’s a video showing a few of the animations I’ve programmed so far:

DOTKLOK prototype preview from The Latest Artists on Vimeo.

The final kit should be ready sometime in October, and will most likely feature a black and smoked acrylic case, with the choice of a red or green LED screen.  I’m going to source some classier buttons, but their position remains undecided: along the bottom, or on the sides?  I’d love to hear people’s preferences on button placement, please share your thoughts in the comments!

I think I became what they call “laser crazy,” as I started another project based on my access to the laser cutter.  This one is a multi-panel, edge-lit design, depicting the iconic New York subway map, with a different colored subway line on each panel:

This piece is destined for an annual show back in Ottawa called Candela, dedicated to light as an artistic medium.  Here’s the formal proposal for the project which describes the entire piece, including an animated simulation written with Processing.

I had a few projects on the go outside of Resistor headquarters as well. Deb and I were able to use our mutual free time in NYC to put together a hardcopy portfolio showcasing a bunch of my previous lighting projects:

You can check out a softcopy here.

All the credit for this one goes to Deb and her awesome graphic design skillz.  For printing, we used a web-based service called Smartpress and were really happy with the cost and quality.

Lastly, I interned with Hernani Dias during his residency at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center to develop some hardware for his ReFarm the City project. Specifically, I designed an LED board for remote data visualization. Here’s a pic of the partially soldered board:

The board features an Atmega168 running the Arduino bootloader, wirelessly updateable via XBee, for controlling 48 Charlieplex’d LEDs. Serendipitously, days before being asked to design this board, I learned about the LOLShield at The Next HOPE conference, so a big thanks to Jimmie P. Rodgers and his documentation which schooled me in the art of Charlieplex’ing.

Speaking of thank you’s, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all the members of NYC Resistor for their amazing hospitality, welcoming me into their extremely enabling and fun space.  It was also especially inspiring to meet the Makerbot crew downstairs, and see them hard at work, creating and reiterating prototypes for future generations and features of the Makerbot.

I look forward to sharing some of the NYCR spirit that’s rubbed off on me with the members of Ottawa’s Mod Lab at Artengine, who just recently acquired and assembled their own Makerbot.

And of course, if any of the Makerbot or Resistor gang find themselves headed to Ottawa, Montreal, or even Toronto, make sure to give me a shout!

Thanks again,

Andrew O’Malley
www.aomalley.org
www.technoetc.net/blog

PS  I’m not affiliated with Adafruit, Sure Electronics, or any of the other products or services mentioned in the above blog post, I just figure it’s handy to provide the info for anyone interested.

NYC Resistor will be hosting a MakerBot build party today (Thursday, September 2nd) during craft night from 6 to 10 pm.

Calling all NYC MakerBot operators! We’re building a bot farm and we need your help! Today (Thursday, September 2nd) at NYC Resistor (map) we are throwing a build party. The goal: assemble three MakerBots in four hours. Drinks and snacks will be provided.

A bot farm is a group of MakerBots available to a group of people ready to print whatever is wished. We would love to print more of the great things popping up on Thingiverse, but here at the bot cave our machines are mostly used for developing future hardware and software. To increase the awesome we need to increase the number of bot hours available for printing. We need more bots and we need your help building them.

Everyone is encouraged to attend. There will be three or more kits for assembly. Just let us know you came for the build party and we’ll get you started on a task. If you’re thinking about buying a Cupcake CNC, this is a great opportunity to experience the build process. Feel free to bring your own MakerBot and work along with us. Several MakerBot employees will be in attendance, building bots and ready to help. We’re looking  forward to seeing you there.

Re-Farm the City is an open-source hardware initiative aimed at creating low-cost tools for urban farming. I’ve been volunteering for Eyebeam resident Hernani Dias, who is here from Spain spreading the gospel of low-cost open-source urban farming tools.

Re-Farm the City will be hosting a two part workshop series @ NYC Resistor this weekend, Aug. 21, Aug. 22 from 12pm to 4pm.  The goal of the workshop is to give an introduction to Re-Farm’s open source tools and to have people build their own mobile urban farms. This includes soldering all the boards needed to control and monitor an urban farm and testing out different watering systems.  There will be a $50 lab fee to cover cost of the electronics and other materials. Only a basic understanding of electronics is necessary.

Click here to register on Eventbrite for the workshop!

Join us for Dan Steingart’s class on batteries. He’s a battery researcher at City College and is giving a free class about batteries at NYC Resistor this Wednesday, 8/18 7-9pm. Here’s how he describes it:

You’d like to sever that USB cable and let your device into the wild, but how will it survive? On batteries, of course! But before you let your little one go, spend a little time at Resistor and learn exactly what is going on inside the battery and how to make the best of it.

You’ll learn:
– What voltage really represents
– Why batteries are not getting much lighter
– How to maximize cycle life
– When to use primary vs. secondary cells
– Why batteries heat up
– Why batteries stop retaining charge
– How to mate batteries with energy harvesting devices
– What a battery looks like on the inside

Please bring questions!

Dan

—
Dan Steingart, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Chemical Engineering
City College of New York

Today in History, the United States became the only country in history to engage in Nuclear Warfare. 80,000 estimated Japanese died in the first attack, climbing to a possible 140,000 as a result of lasting effects of the bombing.

You probably have seen a billion and one great posts regarding the historic, gut wrenching, and generally awesome power of the nuclear weapons that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, up on through the terrifying surreal imagery of the Tsar Bomba test explosion. But, what you might not be aware of, or at least in my mind is not talked about very much is the Oak Ridge uranium enrichment plant. Above is a picture of the plant.

Prior to the outbreak of World War 2 Nuclear Boogaloo, there were only 3000 some odd residents of Oak Ridge Tennessee. It was just one of many normal quiet little towns spread across the United States vast landscape. But thanks in part to it’s proximity to railways and highways, as well as it’s low population Oak Ridge would become home to the dubiously named “Clinton Engineering Works”. By 1945, Oak Ridge would sport a population of 75,000 and be home to the largest building in the world. At one point in fact, Oak Ridge was consuming 1/6th of the entire electrical load of the entire United States. Of course, no one knew that this once aspiring hamlet had grown into a marvel of modern engineering. The entire town was surrounded by layers of fencing, and armed guard towers. Seven gates would have to be passed before anyone could enter the town. The work being done there was so secretive that most of the residents of the town had no idea what it was exactly they were doing until August 6th, 1945. Throughout the Manhattan Project Oak Ridge was simply referred to as “Site X”.

Oak Ridge, was where uranium enrichment was occurring. Without enriched uranium, critical mass could not be reliably achieved. Much of the uranium 235 used in Fatman came from reactors built in Oak Ridge. The Manhattan Project stands as one of the most expensive, and astounding human engineering projects in history. Much of the cost of the project was expended in developing Oak Ridge and the enrichment facilities there.

Apollo Program Total Cost: $170 billion
Manhattan Project Total Cost: $23.4 billion