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Mar 152010
 

We’ve got the first batch of classes at the new NYC Resistor space online.  Come learn a few things and check out our new digs on stylish 3rd Avenue near downtown Brooklyn.

Keep Calm and Solder On

On Saturday, March 20th, Raphael Abrams does a double header.  At 2PM is the fun and practical Introduction to Electronics, a 3 hour lesson on hooking up batteries to components to make things happen.  Then, starting at 6PM, we’ve got our PCB Design using Eagle class where you learn how to draw out a schematic and PC board that you can either etch yourself or send out for production.

The next day, Sunday the 21st, we’ve got our Arduino & Soldering 101 class where you solder together a Freeduino board then write some simple programs to control it.  This one’s taught by Ryan and Liz and it usually sells out.

Finally for now, Pop-Up Shelby is repeating her Paper Engineering class from the Fall where you’ll learn about how to fold, tape, and cut paper to make all sorts of motion-activated animated designs.

[Graphic courtesy of http://sinbox.org]

Mar 132010
 

Since everyone else appears to be at SXSW, I suppose I’ll have to step up for today’s March Madness. I bring you: a screen scraper for retail products on ecommerce sites.

While I’m hardly the first person to write such a tool, finding useful examples or libraries among the hundreds of pages of screen scraper spam has proven difficult. I ended up writing one from scratch in PHP using the DomDocument object.

The goal of the scraper is to come up with the product title, price, and 3 most likely product photos from any given product URL. In order to make it a bit faster (it’s pretty painfully slow), I attempt to filter out images which are obviously not product photos (those which are very long/tall, those which are not displayed in the browser). Then for a bit of extra fun, it sorts the image array by it’s “likeliness” to be a product photo. Obviously it needs some refining to actually be useful.

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Mar 112010
 

If you’re near Manhattan this weekend, stop in to Eyebeam for their MIXER event Friday and Saturday nights (Mar 13 and 14) from 9PM to 2AM.  NYC Resistor will be one of the presenting artists with our “Color Commentary Teletype” a restored 1930’s era Model 15 serial printer, along with a sentiment analysis chart recorder!  MIXER is a huge party, with music, art, and performances.  It’s going to be awesome!

Check out the details at Eyebeam!  Now!

Eyebeam event flyer image

MIXER:Olympiad

 Posted by at 1:11 am
Mar 102010
 

Robert Carlson bridges both the NYC Resistor and DIYBio worlds – he’s an electrical engineer who turns E. coli into circuits! He famously discovered the Carlson curves, the biotech equivalent of Moore’s Law. They show that biotech is advancing at a pace consistent with digital tech.

Come join us at the NEW NYC Resistor space for an afternoon talk by Rob and discussion afterwards.

DATE: Saturday, March 13
TIME: 2:00pm – 4:00pm
LOCATION: NYCR

Here’s a video of Robert from the Economist that appeared on the DIYBio blog recently: http://diybio.org/2010/01/01/rob-carlson-discusses-diybio-and-open-source-biology-on-the-economist. And an excerpt from his Wired article where he wrote about the emergence of DIYBiology in 2005:

The era of garage biology is upon us. Want to participate? Take a moment to buy yourself a molecular biology lab on eBay. A mere $1,000 will get you a set of precision pipettors for handling liquids and an electrophoresis rig for analyzing DNA. Side trips to sites like BestUse and LabX (two of my favorites) may be required to round out your purchases with graduated cylinders or a PCR thermocycler for amplifying DNA. If you can’t afford a particular gizmo, just wait six months – the supply of used laboratory gear only gets better with time. Links to sought-after reagents and protocols can be found at DNAHack. And, of course, Google is no end of help.

Still, don’t expect to cure cancer right away, surprise your loved ones with a stylish new feather goatee, or crank out a devilish frankenbug. (Instant bioterrorism is likely beyond your reach, too.) The goodies you buy online require practice to use properly. The necessary skills may be acquired through trial and error, studying online curricula, or taking a lab course at a community college. Although there are cookbook recipes for procedures to purify DNA or insert it into a bacterium, bench biology is not easy; the many molecular manipulations required to play with genes demand real skills.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.05/view.html?pg=2

Mar 102010
 

From thenexthope.org:

2600 Magazine presents The Next HOPE, the eighth conference in the 16 year history of the Hackers On Planet Earth series. It will happen at the Hotel Pennsylvania in the middle of New York City from July 16-18, 2010, and will be the largest creative technology conference on the U.S. East Coast.

Traditionally HOPE conferences have been more about the talks than the physical projects, but with the 2008 conference that started to change, and this time organizers are pushing for an even stronger showing of projects and tech art. This call for projects goes out to hackers, makers, technologists, artists, and free thinkers around the world. Come share your passions and ideas with 3,000+ of your soon-to-be closest friends.

If you want to pitch in and you don’t know what to do…

* Lounge/Hang-Out Spaces
o HOPE usually has work spaces, seminar spaces, and crash spaces. Can you organize more chill zones for simple conversation?
* Games
o You have 3,000+ people, three floors of a massive hotel, an RFID tracking system, and The City of New York. What can you do with that? Teach, play, explore.
* Art
o What’s your vision of the future? Show us using hardware, software, electricity and imagination.
* Night Life
o The talks usually stop around midnight. What else could be going on between midnight and 9am? Plan it, make it interesting, make it happen.

The main visual theme of the conference is visions of the future from the past, so things that reference The World’s Fairs, The Jetsons, flying cars, DaVinci, Asimov, and so forth would be very appropriate. However, projects are not required to carry the central theme in any way. Some projects, such as OpenAMD, are already being planned to be simply visions of the future from the present, rather than referencing any futurist thoughts from antiquity.

Some projects already in the works include…

* The Attendee Meta-Data Project (“OpenAMD”)
o An expansion of the RFID crowd tracking project from The Last Hope.
o Needs programmers and hardware hackers, and is prime for spinoff projects.
o Many possibilities exist for the development of games, data mining, and visualizations.
o Ask about the OpenAMD API.
o http://amd.hope.net/
o contact: [email protected]
* Radio Statler!
o Streaming 24 hours a day live from the expo floor.
o Needs people to do shows, experienced engineers, reporters, and people with interesting audio gear.
o Needs a large isolation booth.
o http://radio.hope.net/
o contact: [email protected]
* Installation Art
o The Next HOPE invites artists, local and beyond, who have a vision of the future expressed as installation art.
o Installations must be technology-based. They can range from electrical experiments to computer-controlled machines, to data and information processing visualizations, they can be static or interactive, and they could be visual or musical, this is a very open field.
o This is an unpaid exhibition, but the selected installation artists will be given free admission to the conference, and an online gallery with artist biographies will be set up for promotional purposes.
o What are your space, power, time, and data connection requirements?
o contact the curator: [email protected]
* The Hackerspace and Hardware Hacking Village
o A 24 hour gathering point for the hackerspace community, a hardware hacking workshop area, and a supply post for hardware hacking tools and expendables.
o Are you involved with a hackerspace? Reserve a special area for your group to chill and show off projects!
o Looking for hardware hackers and hackerspaces from all around the world to come together and and share ideas.
o contact: [email protected]

If you need help with your project, you can find a lot of people on our forum before the conference starts, at talk.hope.net. The HOPE wiki is also available for your use, wiki.hope.net.

Contact the projects coordinator with a plan of action, along with your space, power, time, and data connection requirements: [email protected].

 Posted by at 4:41 pm

Save the Date!

 Uncategorized  1 Response »
Mar 102010
 

Works include a lineage of variations, modifications and relations to the Arduino microcontroller
Hc Gilje
Aaron Koblin
Hernando Barragán
Edith Kollath
Jan Borchers & René Bohne
Becky Stern
Ranjit Bhatnagar
Oscar G. Torres & Jackoon
Raphael Abrams
Joe Saavedra

Curated by Alicia Gibb, based on the work of her master’s thesis

Special thanks to Shelby Arnold for designing the invite.

 Posted by at 12:01 pm
Mar 102010
 

Here’s a simple paint program I made using canvas. It’s a pretty blatent ripoff of another one that a friend showed me today, but unfortunately I don’t have the URL handy. (Sorry, I’ll update in the morning!) The framework makes it pretty simple for you to add your own tools. Click on for source.

Update: Harmony was the inspiration I was looking for!

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Mar 072010
 

For today’s March Madness program I wanted to try to do something useful with the canvas tag. I decided it would be nice to be able to programmatically generate a background gradient for a web page based on the time of day. If you’re looking at the site in the morning the colors would be different from afternoon, sunset, midnight, etc. I created a hidden canvas tag to do my work and then used the toDataURL method to pass the resulting image to the body’s CSS. Source is below the fold.

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