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May 08 2012
Vintage Computer Festival East 8.0
This weekend a bunch of NYCR members went to the Vintage Computer Festival East (8.0), held at the InfoAge / MARCH computer history museum in Wall, NJ. Read on for more photos from the musuem.
Daniel Kottke, Apple employee #12, gave a keynote about the history of developing the early Apples in Job’s garage through the initial Mac design.
One of the highlights was a functional wire-wrapped DEC PDP-11.
Connected to it was the original terminal, the VT05, as well as VT-102 and VT-220 terminals.
Homebrew computers were in abundance. Here are some hackers hacking away on an unknown system, surrounded by a TI Silent 700, a SWTP 6800 and a PERCOM floppy drive.
There were Apple II’s and many clones were on exhibit at the show.
Inside the MARCH exhibits at the museum were such notables as an original Apple 1. Note the lock on the custom case — a working model recently sold at auction for $213k, so they don’t want this one to go missing!
Frank O’Brien has an exhibit on the Apollo Guidance Computer to go along with his excellent book.
In the punch-card era room is a Univac 1540 tape drive, with dual tape decks. It was also considered a “mobile computer”, in that it could fit inside a trailer or submarine.
And in the warehouse are such treasures as an Amdahl 4705, but the museum lacks the funds to restore and exhibit them. You can donate to MARCH on their website to help bring some of this historical artifacts back to life.
There are some more photos of the museum and exhibits from our trip. You might also enjoy these photos of our restoration of an IBM 129 data data recorder — MARCH provided NOS ribbons so that we can read the printouts.
And finally, one of our purchases at the consignment booth at the show claims “No user servicable parts”. We’ll see about that in a later post…
May 04 2012
From Vendy to Pig Button
We got a great little email on Sunday asking if our Vendy was available for public dispensing. There happened to be a pile of us here hacking on Sunday afternoon, so Nicole dropped by, fed $15 into Machine Uno and get herself a teensy board. On Thursday, Shanshan came round to Craft Night and we got to see what they made:
They didn’t get any action shots of the teensy 
. Nice Arduino though.
April 27 2012
The sound of progress….
Well, work is continuing on my electromechanical computer project. I now have a sort-of-working prototype of my clunky punch-card reader. Hopefully something will be working in time for the interactive show this year =) Enjoy!
April 18 2012
Last call for projects for The Interactive Show
Last call on projects for The Interactive Show. We have a couple of spots left, so if you want to show off your stuff contact us. This year’s event is shaping up to be the best yet. The cheap tickets are nearly sold out, so grab yours now!
April 12 2012
The Open Source Hardware Association is coming soon!
OSHWA will be a non-profit organization (status pending) working to spread the love of open source hardware. We’re still deep in the process of working out all the details, but please bookmark oshwa.org, and check back there for upcoming news.
OSHWA’s first project is a survey, “to better understand the Open Source Hardware community.” Catarina Mota has lead this project and created a survey along with David Mellis and John De Cristofaro. The aggregate and anonymous results will be made publicly available in May. If you’re involved with the OSHW community, we’d invite you to take the survey.
April 07 2012
UV cured 3D printing experiments
For today’s #hackfriday at NYC Resistor a bunch of us were inspired by Junior and ScribbleJ‘s 3D printing projects and experimented with UV curing resin using a DLP projector.
We had some JMP UV stamp resin, although it didn’t cure solid with the normal projected image in our test. Even with thirty minutes of exposure, the resin was unchanged in viscosity.
As a next step, we removed the DLP’s mercury arc lamp and drove it positioned just a few cm directly over the resin.
With the interlock defeated and proper safety precautions, the result was a very quickly cured puck of resin. Which is good news, since it means that there is enough light intensity around 380 nm.
We then removed one of the filters from the light path and the color wheel. The projector wouldn’t turn on with the color wheel removed, so we have it carefully mounted outside of the projector during the next test.
We probed various parts of the light path with a blob of resin to see where it would cure into a solid mass. It appears that the final optic stage before the DLP filters too much of the UV at the necessary wavelengths for this resin.
So we didn’t have total success. Maybe the stamp resin is too insensitive — it is typically exposed via a very strong UV source through a contact print. We’ll order some of the Bucktown Polymers “fast curing” goo for next week’s testing and also start to work on the Z-stage to draw the printed object from the bath once we have the formulation and exposure times experimentally determined.
April 06 2012
#hackfriday
Last November, johngineer proposed #hackfriday, a day for hackerspaces to work on projects. Tomorrow is a holiday from work for many of us, so a bunch of will be hacking away at NYC Resistor. What projects will you work on this long weekend?
April 04 2012
What is this? Guess right and win a free ticket to the Interactive show
First person to correctly guess what this is in the comments gets a free ticket to our upcoming Interactive show on May 19th!
Don’t forget, we’re taking submissions for interactive art pieces in the show now! The theme is “physical meets digital” – so we’ll be extra happy to hear about interactive art that doesn’t make use of screens or projectors, but all submissions are welcome!
Email submissions to party@nycresistor.com
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 Paper 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 12 2012
4×5 view camera adapter for a 35mm SLR
I recently acquired an early 1900′s Gundlach 4×5 view camera with a few lenses and designed an adapter to mount a modern DSLR body where the film plane would go. There is no lens connected to the SLR — the 4×5 lens images directly onto the CMOS sensor. The bracket design is thing:18989 and can likely be adapted for other field or monorail cameras. There are some limitations with the design, but it works acceptably well in practice.
The “view finder” in a view camera is not a small prism with an eyepiece — instead a large 4×5 (100×127 mm) piece of ground glass is positioned directly behind the lens where the film will be inserted. Since there is no pentaprism or reflex mirror, the “real image” appears upside down. The resolved image is fairly faint, so a dark cloth is used to block out ambient light while a loupe is used to focus the camera.
Even the Canon 5D’s full frame 35mm sensor is much too small to image the entire region — the above captured image is clearly cropped compared to the full ground glass. The 4×5 image plane is 161 mm diagonal, while the full frame 35mm is only about 43 mm diagonal, making an effective “crop factor” of about 4x. The above image is with an “8 inch” (210 mm) lens, which is about a normal focal length for 4×5, but would be considered telephoto for 35mm. The lens is still 210 mm, regardless of the camera body it is mounted on; the crop factor is a quick way to compare relative field of views.
One major advantage of using a DSLR with a “Live view” mode is that it allows focusing without using a loupe. To focus, the 10x digital zoom is selected and then the forward standard is moved along the geared rack. Moving the objective lens closer to the film plane will focus further away; the infinity focus is typically at a distance equal to the focal length of the lens.
One drawback to this style mount is that the SLR camera’s film plane is several mm behind the original film plane. This would not be a significant issue since the rear standard can be advanced forwards to adjust for this discrepancy, except that this can cause the bellows to be compressed too far and limit the range of movement. One way to fix this is with a recessed lens board; the other is to mount the lens backwards so that the objective element is inside the bellows, providing a cm or more of additional movement. If the lens is mounted inside, it will need to have the aperture select before installation.
Some of the antique lenses are not very sharp, leading to significant halation and chromatic aberration. They also are not very fast (f/4 and slower) and typically have much lower transmission ratios, so dark indoor photography requires several seconds of exposure. And a “wide” large format lens is still a very tight portrait field of view on the smaller sensor, limiting the use for epic landscapes or building photography.
On the plus side, the ability to have full movement of the objective element and film plane makes for some marvelous opportunity to experiment with rise/fall, tilt, shift and swing. The beautiful wood work on some of these field cameras makes them quite the attention getter, as well.
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/
The Resistor Jeltone
A few months ago we put together a little team to enter the Jello Mold Competition at Gowanus Studio Space. The team members were me, Ranjit Bhatnagar, Astrida Valigorsky, and Mimi Hui. After a false start or two, we ended up making a working toy piano out of jello (and some electronics). You can see them in action on the videos below.
As part of our experiments we realized that jello and fruit, which contain a lot of water, are conductive. Embedded in each jello/fruit key is a sterling silver pin (food safe) connected to an Arduino microcontroller underneath the piano’s base. Below the piano’s case is another sterling silver pin. With this setup, the JelTone can either be played with a metal utensil connected to the Arduino, gloves enhanced with conductive thread, or bare hands by touching both a key and the piano’s case.
If you’d like to make your own, you can get the project files, code and instructions from Thingiverse.
The JelTone (in its jello and fruit versions) was exhibited and eaten at the 2011 Solid Sound Festival (Mass MoCA), the Jello Mold Competition (where it was awarded the creativity prize), the NY Hall of Science “Dead or Alive” Halloween Festivities, the Toy Piano Festival, and the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition.
A stellar performance by Ranjit at the
Guthman Musical Instrument Competition
A master pianist plays the Jeltone at the NY Hall of Science
The Jeltone at the 2011 Solid Sound Festival
The Jeltone at the Jello Mold Competition
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