The Show and Tell event of the century is happening in two hours! Get on over here with a few friends, a few drinks, and something to show and tell (if you want to).
You’re free to invite anyone you like. You can even send an invitation to the Facebook event.
Did you do a fun hack you’d like to share? Do you have a cool new logic analyzer everyone should know about? Have you found the perfect pair of tweezers? Do you have anything you want to show and tell about? If yes, this is the event for you.
Come hang out with interesting people and share whatever you like as we re-explore Show and Tell from a hacker perspective.
Each attendee will be given a few minutes (depending on the number of speakers) to show and tell. We’ll even provide a projector! Non-presenting spectators are welcome, but everyone is encouraged to share something. This is a non-formal event, so feel free to bring drinks, cookies, and friends. You’ll have to leave the kids at home; nobody under 18 years of age.
Sign up begins when the doors open at 7:30 PM. Show and Tell begins at 8:00 PM. If you come late, there may not be enough time to get you one stage, so come early and reserve your spot.
During Hackday I worked on a display for the Stabby ID.
I have six or so HDSP 2111 units lying around. They also come in green and red led models.
Read on for Schematic and Demo Arduino Source
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It was only after hours of searching that I finally came up with what I was looking for: a way to take a polygon mesh (OBJ or similar) and convert it into a blueprint for building LEGO sculptures.
Don't get me wrong, there are tons of tools out there for LEGO CAD. But strangely none of them mention being able to go from a mesh to a LEGO layout. It's surprising, since it seems like such a natural fit. The rise of 3D printers has rejuvinated interest in voxels, voulmetric pixels, and as evidenced by all the LEGO sculpture artists we seem to be in a golden age of LEGO.
Armed with Blender and a giant LEGO collection, I set out to get the computer to do the hard work for me. I used Blender, graph paper, a pencil, and of course lots of LEGOs.
Step 1: Voxelizing a Utah teapot
Let me preface this by saying that the Blender UI is not for the faint of heart. I took classes on Rhino and 3DSMax in college, and thought to myself "how different could it be?" The answer: very. If you're new to blender, don't fear the manual. You're going to need it, particularly the parts on installing/using python scripts.
To voxelize the teapot I used a script called Add Cells which covers the surface of any object with any other object. First I imported the teapot, and scaled it up a bit. Then I created my "fundamental unit" of LEGO. LEGOs have an aspect ratio of 6:5, so I created a 1×1 LEGO, a 0.6×0.5×0.5 rectangular prism in Blender.
Selecting both the teapot and my 1×1 lego I ran the Add Cells script (go to the Scripts menu –> Add -> Cells). I chose the Teapot for my object to be voxelized and the 1×1 LEGO as my voxel model.
Tada! A blocky teapot!
Step 2: Graphing each layer on paper
In order to make the build process easier, I went through layer by layer and drew a map of each layer on graph paper. This way when building with LEGOs I could shade in with a pencil each voxel I'd built. It sounds redundant, but when things all start looking the same after a few minutes and something isn't lining up, it's very helpful.
To see one layer at a time in Blender I went into Sculpture Mode, side view, and used ctrl+shift+right mouse to select and hide all but the layer I wanted to see. Then I switched to Top view and copied the layer onto my graph paper. By the end I had a sheet of paper full of wobbly circular outlines.
Step 3: Building it with LEGOs!
The completed model uses 244 LEGOs, many of which are tiny 1×1 and 1×2 bricks. The model is hollow, but the walls need to be fairly thick to be able to support the top. As it is I probably should have made things a little thicker; putting the last two layers on was a delicate operation.
I built each layer sequentially. There were a few overhang pieces near the bottom which I had to append to the layer above them, since they couldn't anchor to anything below.
Overall the project took about 4 hours, with a break in the middle for breakfast, church, etc.
Total LEGO count for the project was 244 individual bricks, distributed thusly:
(if you saw this before, don’t worry — I’ve revived it to the front page to encourage more people to come out!)
Us Resistors love electronics and we love music. Often, we find ways to make music using electronics. That’s why we’re really happy to be hosting several workshops with the 2010 International Computer Music Conference that’s here in the New York City area in early June.
Unlike normal Resistor classes, you’ll need to go the Workshops page on the ICMC site to register. Here’s a list of what’s being offered at our space.
They’re going to be a lot of fun, and they should attract participants from all over the computer music world.
Video of our presentation at Hackday:
In the video,
Ben Combee is speaking, Max Henstell is working the stabster’s pneumatics and Mark Tabry is standing by to protect bystanders, and I am off camera to the left looking pretty for the cameras.
Not in the video is Bill Ward, Charles Pax, as well as the original Max.
* Special thanks to my friend Adam from Twilio who provided us with some assistance in the effort.
For the blow by blow of the event check out our time lapse. Trust me it was 24 hours of tedium just as grueling as watching this 2.5 minute clip.As you can see this was an pretty large effort by NYCR and a hell of a lot more went into this project than is readily apparent. Just getting the equipment there was an event all its own. Max and Charles worked tirelessly to repair Stabby’s pneumatic stabber arm. Max also worked on wiring up the actuators and accompanying arduino code to link up with Ben, Bill, and Marks twilio interface code base. I worked with Mark on a display that showed debug info from the arduinos ( blogarythmic cred ) as well as caller ( aka stabber ) id when stabbing.
We finished up about 5 minutes before time was called… literally. Came down to the wire. Stabby was awarded a runner up award, and supposedly will be on display at Tech Crunch on Wednesday some time during the day.
We had a hell of a lot of fun, and were excited to present a functioning project ( a first for me =P ). Even more exciting was winning a runner up award in a contest that didn’t actually have runner up awards. I guess they were afraid of being stabbed.
Two nycresistor groups… zach and pax rocking team makerbot, and max, bill, ben, pax again, mark, and myself rocking team stabs.
Let the bloodbath commence!
We’re time lapsing, and Mr Stabby is here getting his API action on… literally.
Stop by what we are calling battle station resistor in the deep recesses of the hacker caves.
If you have spare sparkfun line relay breakouts… we could use 4 to six if you have some to spare… otherwise we’ll be rube goldeberg a solution.
As you can see from our time lapse of the NYCR stage and dance floor (actually just our workshop floor without tables) we had a great time. Thanks for being awesome friends of NYCR. Hope to do it again, bigger and better, soon.
Be prepared. The next one will be even more awesome.
Also search for tag NYCResistor on flickr for more awesome photos.
When you plug in, or join the wireless network at NYC Resistor, you are joining a very special network. We’re one of the first networks to join with Agora Link. The North American arm of a global Research network that is linking hackerspace’s internal networks together into one awesome collaborative mesh. We’re tied in with the ChaosVPN in Germany, and as of this past weekend we have 50 registered ( not necessarily active yet ) end points. Anyways, if you are interested in this sort of thing, you can read more about that here:
What does this get us? What’s the payoff? Well, we’re just starting to get to work on demonstrating that. First up on deck is a plan to host an international CTF competition using hackerspaces and other labs as the meeting points for teams. So look forward to more details on that in the near future. But, it won’t stop there. We’ve got a bunch of really great ideas that should be popping up over the next year.