I gave Zach several months to post this. And he hasn’t. I am not sure why, but it’s probably because he’s too busy advancing his skills and the capacity of his makerbots to take the time. A few months ago we hosted an amazing hackathon at NYC Resistor. During that event Bill was hard at work getting to grips with how the model 15-ro teletype, that I bought on e-bay for a dollar, operated.

It turns out the teletype only has 2 electromechanical parts… the motor and an actuator. Everything else is mechanical. All the amazing engineering and mind blowing beauty aside… that makes it very difficult to debug the device. So while Bill was struggling to step the device through it’s instructions Zach was building and perfecting yet another makerbot.

As the two of them conversed about their trials and tribulations Zach set out to use his makerbot to help Bill out. He designed a gear that bill could use to manually advance the main rotational shaft in the device and thusly step through instructions. Moderately simple little thing, but obviously designing these obvious components is… somewhat harder than it looks.

The amazing part to me isn’t the component made by zach, or the teletype. It’s the fusion of a prototyped component made using 2010 technology used to solve a problem on a 1930s machine. Just because two guys working on very different projects just happened to be sitting next to each other when they worked on their respective contraptions.

To me the image of this one new component on this amazing piece of antiquity is a thing of subtle beauty. A clash of cultures, a contrast of design, and a community of exceptional craft all there in one simple photo. Sometimes a thousand words simply isn’t enough to describe it.

Anyways, I hope you guys are seeing something as amazing here as I am.

Our friends over at Tekserve in Manhattan are hosting an eWaste recycling event April 10th, 2010 from 10am to 4pm. Find out the full details here, especially WHAT YOU CAN BRING: http://tekserve.com/recycling

A sample of the stuff they’ll take: computers, monitors, fax machines, printers/copiers, televisions, DVD players, VCRs, radios/stereos, telephones, cameras.  No bulk-drops from businesses though.  NO home appliances like fridges, microwaves, stoves, or air conditioners either.  They’re also raffling off a Macbook.  Check their link for the full scoop.

So there’s been some news regarding Scrabble making some rule changes as of late. I’m not sure I hold with all those rules, but I figured if we’re looking at making scrabble better I’d toss my hat into the ring.

My new scrabble tile set provides game players with a fully international character set through the miracle of character set encoding standards. By using my entirely hexadecimal tile set you can deploy your scrabble words in full unicode, or simple ascii. I think however, I might need a bigger board. The memory space on this bit of antiquity is a bit on the small side.

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Dear Parker Brothers, this is a parody. Please do not threaten litigation. I mean you no harm. In fact I am quite sure my suggestion of homebrew tile sets can only increase interest in scrabble and scrabble related paraphernalia. I am your friend. Love me as I have loved you. Please.

NYC Resistor was invited to exhibit our old Teletype Model 15 at Eyebeam’s MIXER event last March.  To make life interesting, we used a small Python program to grab tweets from Twitter matching the “eyebeam” keyword.  Watching a 50+ year old device once used to bang out the news of the day turn to printing the trivialities of the moment seems to echo the fate of professional journalists as the world’s attention span dwindles. To make things more interesting, we used a sentiment analysis algorithm to parse incoming tweets for positive or negative sentiment. The results were reflected on an old chart plotter. Positive sentiments moved the mark left. The middle of the paper represented neutral sentiment. Click the image for more photos and a video awaits after the break.

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(More photos coming tomorrow)