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March 28 2012
Interactive Show: Date set, Tickets on sale
Save the date: May 19th, 2012. Tickets are officially on sale and project submissions are starting to roll-in. Come see a 16-foot LED dome, collaborative art using your smartphone, and I think I heard something about a mechanical water-based Scorched Earth game.
Have something small or large you want to show off at the show? Let us know!
March 26 2012
Catarina’s Playable Papercraft Piano Box
The piano box is a (somewhat polyphonic) paper toy synthesizer with 12 keys, each triggering a tone and an LED. The keys are a set of capacitive sensors, made of copper tape, controlled by an Arduino Mega running the CapSense and Tone libraries. The code for this project, written by Will Byrd and Catarina Mota, can be downloaded here. Please note that the current version of the Tone library has some problems on Arduino 1.0. so it’s best to use version 23 or earlier.
The libraries used are available here:
http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Main/CapSense
http://code.google.com/p/rogue-code/wiki/ToneLibraryDocumentation
Music: Chibi Ninja – from Resistor Anthems by Eric Skiff
March 23 2012
With algorithms subtle and discreet / I seek iambic writings to retweet
I just finished Pentametron: a twitter bot that sifts through about 5 million tweets a day, collecting just the ones that happen to be in iambic pentameter. The result is a sort of collective nonsense poem from the internet’s endless flows of language. You can follow Pentametron in realtime on twitter – @pentametron – or read the collected tweets in sonnet form at pentametron.com, updated several times per hour.
Pentametron is written in PHP and uses @fennb’s Phirehose library to access twitter’s streaming API at a rate of 40-60 tweets per second.
Intro to iOS Development for Programmers
Come learn the basics of iPhone and iPad development! This 3-hour class will introduce you to the high-level concepts of the iOS SDK, the Objective-C language, the Xcode IDE including Interface Builder and the iOS build system, MVC using UIKit, Apple’s most common and useful frameworks, networking using web services, and much more! This class is offered March 31st and is taught by Resistor members Chris Beauvois and Jon Santiago.
Sign up at Eventbrite: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2837630429
March 21 2012
The Third Annual Interactive Show: Call for projects
Get that Club Mate cold and those soldering irons hot because it’s time for another Interactive Show! We’re putting out the call to hackers around the globe to come show your stuff at our annual party.
This years theme: Physical meets digital. Think kinect-controlled robots, or video game elements brought into the real world, or crowd-sourced smartphone accelerometer collaborations. As always anything interactive applies so use your imagination.
We’re targeting mid-May so there’s plenty of time to get involved. If you’re interested in participating drop us a line.
March 20 2012
Ranjit’s “Laser Whistles”
Ranjit Bhatnagar of MoonMilk.com (and NYCResistor Member) shows us his Laser-cut Whistles and talks about his Instrument-a-Day project.
Learn more about “Instrument-a-Day” here:
http://www.moonmilk.com/
Source files for the laser cat whistle here:
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6442
Music: “Digital Native” by Eric Skiff – available free here:
http://soundcloud.com/eric-skiff/
March 14 2012
Get started on that iPhone or iPad app you’ve been thinking about.
One of our amazing members, Chris Beauvois, is teaching this three hour tour de force of iPad/iPhone app development. If you have experience with objects and classes, you’ll get a great head start to finally make that killer app.
March 02 2012
Mystery Box
When Raphael needed to clean up the faces of the aluminum enclosure for his latest mysterious project, he decided to go fancy.
The sides of this cube are milled with space-filling Moore curves, generated by the same script I used to etch the shared laptop at NYCR.
It really is quite nice.
March 01 2012
Intro to HTML/CSS Workshop this Saturday
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.
Sign up at EventBrite: http://www.eventbrite.com.au/event/2838147977/
February 21 2012
Morse code keyboard
Have you switched your QSOs to PSK31 or some other digital mode, but miss the joy of sending CW with an iambic paddle? Then here’s a project for you.
Bill Ward (KD4ISF), Guy Dickenson (KD7TJJ) and Dave Clausen (W2VV) setup a club call sign N2YCR and a remotely operated computer station running fldigi for PSK31. The machine is in the backroom at NYCR and can be operated by members with general class amateur radio licenses from anywhere, using xvnc to display the fldigi application.
But operating it with a keyboard has none of the feel of an old fashioned QSO, so I designed an interface for Dave’s BY-1 Bencher Iambic Paddle. Iambic paddles are very different from straight keys in that they have two inputs: one for “dit” and one for “dah”. If an input is held in, it will repeat at a pre-programmed speed. If both are held in, they will alternate between the two symbols. Typically the dah is three time as long as the dit.
The paddle itself doesn’t generate the code; this is the responsibility of the radio, or in this case, of the Teensy 2.0. It runs a state machine that listens for PIND4 to be pulled low to indicate a dah, or PIND5 to be pulled low for a dit. If neither is pulled low within the time of two dits, the current bit-stream is looked up in a table and if there is a valid USB keyboard event in the table it will be sent to the host computer.
With a straight key the computer would need to estimate the codes per minute and try to differentiate dits from dahs. But with the iambic paddle, the operator has input the separate symbols so there is no difficult step to determine the code. This makes it feasible to run the entire decoding stack in a small microcontroller like the ATMega32U4.
Sending CW without audio feedback is very hard, so a tone is produced via PWM on OC0A at 498 Hz, directly into a speaker scavenged from an old headset. Software controls the volume in a crude fashion by limiting the on-time of the square wave. If the input sequence is not a valid Morse code, the timer 0 is switched to a slower speed, which causes OC0A to be driven at half speed, or 249 Hz, which will indicate an error tone.
Full source for the Teensy is available for your own use. It should appear as a generic USB keyboard and work with any application.
The case is made using my laser cut box generator and available on Thingiverse. I cut it using 6mm clear acrylic at 100% power, 4% speed, and etched the raster at 100% power, 20% speed. The box is a friction fit and holds together without any screws or glue.
Some possible improvements are to have an external potentiometer to control the speed of the CW (currently it is a compile time constant), and to create a USB serial device that translates its input into audio so that you can have a full CW QSO with fldigi.
fadenb
February 19 2012
Dome If You Want To
Tonight, we assembled our new 16′ diameter PVC dome. The result of two solid Saturdays of work, it came together beautifully. Now we just need to disassemble it and move all the furniture back in before tomorrow’s class…
The members are 1″ PVC pipe. We flattened the ends by heating them briefly in the kiln…
… and clamping them between two handy bits of heavy metal.
A few minutes with the drill press to finish them up…
… add a few bolts, washers, and nuts to flavor.
And then take it all down to adjust the angles…
Put it back up…
Just a few more bolts, and there you are. All dome!
Now you can dome in the morning, you can dome at night, you can dome when you wanna dome.
February 14 2012
Geeky Valentine’s day Ecards from the US Patent Office
A few days ago, one of our newest members, @dustynrobots shared a link to some amazing Valentine’s day cards with the rest of the group.
These amazing Valentine’s day cards for makers by Steve Hoefer are sourced from old public domain US Patent Office. They’re awesome and hilarious, and have inspired us to make a few things.
First, it got me to make the ecard site that I’ve been thinking about for a while now. Postkin’s GeekCards are free, funny ecards for the geeky people in your life. These cards were so amazing, once Steve agreed to let me use them, I had to get the site built in time for Valentine’s day!
Now that the site is built, I’ll be adding more geeky ecards for other events soon! It’s also flash-free and built on web standards so you can actually view the cards when you get the email on your phone.
Hope you enjoy the ecards, and if you have ideas for other geeky ecards we can create, please let me know!
In the meantime, Trammel has been working away on letterpressed editions of these cards on our Intaglio press. Hopefully we’ll have some more pictures of the process and finished cards soon!
Trammel has a great writeup on using the letterpress, but if we pester him in the comments and maybe he’ll do a post about the process of making these plates and some of the other amazing new stuff he’s been up to with the letterpress lately!
cuda
February 11 2012
Hacking the Gilson
Like playing chase-the-laser-pointer with a kitten.
After a couple weeks of hacking on the Gilson we have PID* control.
When we first saw the Gilson, we didn’t have access to any feedback mechanisms. All we had were panic stop modes of control. After a ton of experimentation, and Nick reading five control theory books, we are having fewer incidents in which someone yells “Holy Crap Make It Stop Before It Destroys Itself!” It’s not yet a null set, but the cardinality is significantly reduced.
<cue loud bang>
* proportional integral derivative
February 08 2012
Raph’s “Puncher” freelance time tracking device
Raphael Abrams shows us his Freelance “Puncher” time tracking device. After trying many different methods for keeping track of his hours, Raph created this little puncher to easily clock in and out of his freelance work.
Check out the code and schematics here: https://github.com/raphaelabrams/freelance-puncher
February 05 2012
Let there be backlight!
When life gives you busted up old LCD panels, make… lightboxes! I constructed this one out of the CCFL backlight from an old laptop LCD I found around the space. It gives a nice, even white light, and runs off a 9V at about half an amp.
The inverter for the backlight was long gone, so I replaced it with one of these inexpensive CCFL inverters from MPJA.
A little hot glue and acrylic cement later, we have a perfectly serviceable lightbox. Now, what ever could we use one of those for?
February 03 2012
Arduino: The Documentary
We’ll let this bit of awesomeness speak for itself 
Check out all the Resistor cameos!
Learn more here!
http://arduinothedocumentary.org/
January 22 2012
Video: Bill Ward’s Simple Serial Display
At a recent meeting I had a chance to sit down and check out Bill’s “Simple serial display” which, true to it’s name, is simple, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting one badly! Watch the vid to see it in action, and check out Bill’s earlier post for more info!
Music: Eric Skiff, Resistor Anthems – HHavoc Intro
January 18 2012
January 16 2012
IBM 129 Card Data Recorder
This weekend PMF and I cleaned an IBM 129 Card Data Recorder and were able to fairly reliably punch cards once we were done. When we started it would frequently jam during feeding, mis-feed during the punch, and not cleanly stack the cards in the output bin.
Most of the problem was thirty years of dust, card fiber and grime built up in the mechanisms. The output hopper was full of it and needed a good cleaning to reliably pick up cards into the output stack:
The card punch and keyboard only appear to be seated on the table. They are just the tip of the iceberg — much of the power and computerized bits fill the space underneath the desk. The bottom of the keyboard is in a cut-out in the desk surface and has a traditional typewriter mechanism that closes reed switches when each key is pressed, except for the special keys like “FEED”, “REL” and “REG” that directly actuate lever switches.
Luckily the “monolithic memory” was still fully functional. Debugging the logic part of the system would be an immense task — it is implemented with a wire-wrapped backplane and fills the bottom portion of the desk. Hidden behind it was a bookshelf with full schematics and a “Maintenance Theory” manual that described the interaction of the various components.
The individual boards in the backplane appear to be hand soldered and mostly consist of the what appears to be the same component, likely Solid Logic Technology blocks:
Once it was cleaned up, PMF tried puching some cards with great success:
We were able to verify that the registration of the cards and the punch were fairly accurate with this card guage:
The ink tape of the print head that marks a human readable version of the EBCIDC was totally dry. Perhaps we can adapt a typewriter ribbon to work:
Also hidden in the bottom of the card punch was an incident report log, with the last entry from 1980. For a device manufactured starting in 1973 that is a very long life. The logbook is sitting on an IBM card sorter, which will be cleaned up later.
We ended up not using the IBM-6 Oil Spray:
Here’s a 1971 advertisement for the IBM 129 that notes its new features, including the monolithic memory, the ability to tabulate columns of the cards, and the automated card feeding, punching and stacking mechanisms:
And here are more photos and video of the card punch. Once we have the manuals scanned and cleaned up, I’ll post links, too.
December 15 2011
BIG SCARY ROBOT TIME
Some friends at a local university reached out to us recently and offered to let us rescue a robot from a junkyard fate. Not being in the business of turning down free robots, we quickly agreed. Three of us showed up on Monday in a Ford Escape. We left in a U-Haul.
This beast of a machine weighs in at 550lbs. It’s a Gilson Cyberlab C400 Automated Plate Preparation Workstation. We’re not exactly sure what that is, but we do know that it has a huge robotic gantry meant to move at high speed with accurate positioning. And it has neuroprobes. What are we going to do with it? Maybe it will be the next BarBot. Or a 3D Printer. Or maybe some sort of exercise machine. We’re not sure yet. Check the vids.
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