If you’ve been playing with the Arduino and want to figure out how to go to the next level, this Sunday’s Beyond Arduino class is for you. Jarek Lupinski is going to be talking about how to breakboard your own designs using bare microcontrollers, how to program this chips using ICSPs, and how to downsize from the Arduino’s ATMega 328/168 to the less expensive ATtiny 45.
Details and registration at http://beyondarduino.eventbrite.com/
Travis Goodspeed and others designed a very, very sweet little MSP430-based badge for this year’s HOPE. It allows the OpenAMD project to keep track of where you are and what you’re doing by broadcasting a unique ID. However, we’ve discovered that there are some people, like Travis himself, who aren’t nearly as ubiquitous as they should be. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could help out by being Travis, too? Well, now you can! Opendopple is a cute little modification to the stock firmware that allows you to clone others. Just trigger the rightmost general I/O pin, and it will clone the ID and sequence number of the next packet it can find. Resetting your badge will restore your original ID.
You can find the source here. Read the readme, and have fun!
http://puredata.info/community/NYCPatchingCircle
We are reviving the New York City Patching Circle and making it a monthly thing! Every third Sunday of the month, we’ll be meeting at NYC Resistor. Last month we worked on Gem and laid plans for an object based on Mac OS X’s IOSurface to allow different programs like Pd/Gem, Quartz Composer, etc. to share textures in the GPU.
We spend enough time alone staring at our computers; we are proposing to work together. So often issues that arise when working can be solved with a quick two minute discussion that would take hours to solve alone. We have Dorkbot to see people’s work, we have Share where anyone can play, we have workshops and universities to learn from. This is a meeting where we all can come to work.
This is an informal gathering of patching and patchers (Pd, Max/MSP/Jitter, and even vvvv, Eyesweb, Labview, etc.). Beginners and Experienced welcome. Open to everyone, students, the public, etc. Work on school projects, personal projects, ask for help, help others, or just patch quietly to yourself, in a room full of other people patching patches and helping other people patch.
Time/Date
Every third Sunday of the month, so this Sunday, July 18th!
noon-6pm
Directions
NYC Resistor
87 3rd Avenue, (between Bergen and Dean), 4th Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11217
Tel. +1.347.850.4872 or +1.347.586.9270
2/3/4/5/B/D/Q/N/R to Atlantic/Pacific
LIRR to Atlantic Terminal
F/G to Bergen
An open hardware definition has been mulling around in a few emails ever since the Opening Hardware Workshop, put on by Ayah Bdeir. Tonight, a draft of the definition was released as well as an announcement for an Open Hardware Summit to discuss everything about Open Hardware.
The Open Hardware Summit is currently looking for speakers and sponsors. And there are lots more ways to get involved of course. You can also give your feedback on v0.3 of the Open Source Hardware Definition here: http://freedomdefined.org/OSHW
Our first of the Luna Lazzzor Talk Series, Jon Santiago will tell us about his experiences with Sustainable South Bronx, and their mobile FabLab.
When: Monday, July 12th at 8:00PM
Where: NYC Resistor
Admission is free.
What better way to spend a hot, humid Sunday Brooklyn afternoon than checking out Buzz-A-Rama, a 1960’s era slot car parlor in Kensington? Inside this unassuming storefront are 4 or 5 large twisting tracks, where children and adults race cars about 3 inches wide by 6 inches long, much larger than the matchbox-sized slot cars I played with as a kid. Amateurs like us use slow cars rented from Buzz. The pros, however, bring their own custom lightning-fast cars and controllers, and they are quite serious about them.
The car chassis are cut from lightweight aluminum composite using electrical discharge machining. Motivation is provided by high-performance brushless DC motors. Wheels and tires are made of special sticky, heat-resistant rubber, with a set of chemicals and rituals for cleaning and warm-up before a big race.
The lightweight plastic body can be either an aerodynamic wedge shape that directs airflow up, forcing the rear wheels down for better traction, or a more traditional scale model of a production muscle car. Super-cool retro body styles are available as well.
The controllers are also semi-custom built, and are adjustable by the operator to conform to his or her desired level of aggression in acceleration and braking.
Continue reading »
QRSS is a term used in ham radio to mean “very slow speed morse code”. QRPp means “using a very low power radio transmitter”. What happens when you combine these concepts? Small, simple, radios that can communicate over thousands of miles using about the same amount of power as a TV remote control.
The radio shown above is based on a kit by Hans Summers, G0UPL, that I picked up at the Four Days in May QRP convention. It uses a single-sided circuit board, with three transistors, one crystal, five toroids, a basic microcontroller, and a handful of resistors and capacitors. I added a 5v regulator, an LED to show the keying activity, and put it in an Altoids tin. The whole thing probably cost about $25 in parts, and took one evening to assemble.
After building it and tweaking it to get it on exactly the right frequency, I hooked it up to the dipole on the roof of NYC Resistor, and flipped on the power switch. My 100 milliwatt signal went up into the sky, bounced around between the ionosphere and the ocean a bit, and was picked up by a radio operated by Johan, ON5EX, in Belgium. He runs what is known as a “grabber” — a radio and computer combination that monitors the QRSS portion of the 30m band, converts the signals into digital spectrographic images, and publishes them on the internet.
Here is a screen capture from Johan’s website shortly after I powered on my transmitter. It shows about 100Hz of spectrum (frequency is on the vertical axis) over 11 minutes (horizontal axis). My signal is in the center of the graph. It’s my call sign, W2VV, sent repeatedly in morse code (·–– ··––– ···– ···–) at about 10.140015 MHz. If you listened to this signal as audio, you would mostly hear static. The horizontal lines you see in the graph would come out as tones. The higher the line, the higher the pitch of the tone. My signal would sound like a tone that changes pitch ever so slightly up and down as the dots and dashes are sent. However my signal would probably be so weak as to be inaudible through the static. It is only discernible when converted to visual form and then compressed over a long period of time.
Belgium is about 3600 miles away from New York, which means this transmission achieved an amazing power efficiency of 36,000 miles per watt. Also, it occupied just a tiny sliver of bandwidth — only 5Hz, meaning many other people could share the same range of frequencies without interfering with each other. However you don’t get something for nothing in life, and the tradeoff in this situation is that very little information was sent. It took six minutes just to send my four-character callsign. Still, that’s not a bad deal for a $25 radio that fits in your pocket.
Visit my Flickr page for more photos of the build. Better yet, come to our Ham Party on Saturday and see it for yourself! And if you can’t make it to our place, visit one of the hundreds of other ham radio clubs across the country hosting public events this weekend in honor of ARRL Field Day.
72/73, Dave W2VV
In honor of Field Day we’ve teamed up with our friends at Adafruit Industries, MAKE, and MakerBot to create some special offers for ham radio operators. While we are throwing our ham party for Field Day, our friends will be offering discounts on kits, books, tools, and other goodies. We hope that Field Day will be a great opportunity for the hacker and ham communities to get to know each other.
Adafruit Industries is like the Hendricks of the hacker community. They have fantastic kits ranging from retro Russian display tube clocks to TV-B-Gone a high power remote that can turn off TVs everywhere (like in noisy bars). Adafruit will be offering a 10% discount on their kits from June 26-27 for all licensed hams. Just enter code “HAMS” at check out and in the comments include your callsign.
MAKE Magazine is the hacker’s version of QST. MAKE Magazine has projects, profiles makers, and shows tips and tricks. MAKE is offering a 20% discount off of everything in the MakerShed including books, kits, and tools. From 6/25-6/27 enter discount code “HAMHACKER” and your callsign in the comments (one time use, not combinable, no minimum purchase).
MakerBot Industries is the first place to sell homebrew 3-D printers. And since the printers are homebrew, they are actually affordable (kind of like some of the early radios kits). MakerBot is offering a 5% discount on MakerBots. Email your callsign this weekend to [email protected] to get the discount code.
You can win prizes from Adafruit, Maker Shed, and MakerBot at our Ham Radio Party this Saturday June 26th from 8pm-1am.
This past Sunday, DJ Eric Beug took the ham radio for a test drive. As Dave Clausen, W2VV made Morse code contacts on the air, Eric remixed the ham radio’s audio into dance music. Eric will be DJing from 11pm until 1am at our Field Day party, Hackers and Hams Unite! on June 26th.
In addition to the awesome prizes from Adafruit and Makerbot we will also be giving away 3 copies of Make: Electronics, 3 copies of Getting Started With Arduino, 3 copies of the current issue of Make, and… drum roll… 1 Make: Components Pack 1.
Here is a video of our 10pm demo: Using a low power amateur radio transmitter and a simple light bulb receiver circuit, we see how radio waves and electromagnetic induction transmit energy and signals wirelessly through the air. We also see how dipole and Yagi antennas radiate their energy in different patterns.
In need of a better storage/organization scheme for my Lego collection, I made these meta legos: boxes that look and function like legos which hold my legos. The full details are available on Kellbot! but, long story short, I used OpenSCAD to create plans for boxes in any brick dimensions I like.
If you haven’t used OpenSCAD, it’s super handy for generating .dxfs for laser cutting, and is great for designing parts to be MakerBot’d as well. I’m teaching an Intro to OpenSCAD class next weekend, it’s only $25 and no prior programming experience is required!
Plans and more details can be found at [Kellbot!]
