Reconfigurable House 2 at Place@Space at Z33.be from Adam Somlai-Fischer on Vimeo

A fascinating project coming out on July 4th-6th at the Hungarian Cultural Centre in London. The project is called The Scattered House and is best described as:

The Reconfigurable House is an environment constructed from thousands of low tech components that can be “rewired” by visitors. The project is a critique of ubiquitous computing “smart homes”, which are based on the idea that technology should be invisible to prevent DIY.

The project comes from the group reorient.hu that also created this video below for a technically inspired architectural piece for a show in Venice in 2006.

Reorient Migrating Architecture Exhibition

I was on a photography lightning kick for a little while… whenever a storm struck in Brooklyn I ran to my deck, set up the camera on a tripod and opened the timer for 30 seconds, hoping that luck was on my side (in every respect) and that everything was pointing in the right direction to capture a bolt or 2 in my lens. This process usually takes about 20 minutes, involves me getting soaked, and scares the absolute %^$# out of me when the storm gets closer. Needless to say, I’ve lucked out every once in a while and captured the odd picture like this:

Well, as I was slouched my laptop last night I came across Maruice Ribble’s website (what a cool name!): Glacial Wanderer. The site has some very cool and simple projects with Miss Arduino and her trusty friends (XPORT, etc.). But he also has a great program/hack to detect lightning and set off a camera trigger to fire your shutter, all in 67ms, while lighting sticks around for a 100ms.

In the Robotics section of his site there are other super simple projects that are really well documented and tremendiously useful. The code is all there for you, diagrams, circuits and photos. It’s a nice little resource for some camera and sensor hacks.

Very clever video featuring a large handful of famous YouTubers (not imitation actors). Pretty smart stuff.

We have our monthly study group coming up. Bring your projects to discuss with a group of like minded nerdy people, chat about potential blinking, buzzing, whirring things you’d like to build, or come by and talk to us about classes you would like to take (or see us offer).

The next meeting is Wednesday, April 23rd from 7-9 p.m. at the NYCResistor Headquarters. 397 Bridge Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201 — 5th Floor, look for the pack of resistors on the door. Suggested donation is $5 (or more if you’re feelin’ generous) to help pay the electric bill/rent.

Viva La’ Resistors!

Liquidware has a great touch shield out for the Arduino. It’s a 128×128 OLED display with a resistive touch screen on top. It can hold up to 60 full screen images and only uses pins 3 and 4 on your Arduino. It may seem pricey at just over $100, but it’s worth every penny considering everything that’s packed onto that little shield (they even managed to squeeze in 16MB of on board video ram). You can pick one up here and you can look at the open source code here. If you end up getting one, let us know what you end up building with it… I’m off to buy one now!