When Raphael needed to clean up the faces of the aluminum enclosure for his latest mysterious project, he decided to go fancy.

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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?

A common complaint around NYC Resistor nowadays is that we never blog anything anymore. And it’s true! We’re so busy hacking on stuff that we hardly ever get the chance to document it. Bad hackers!

Anyway, here’s a project from May of this year. It’s Hexascroller, your friendly neighborhood integrated clock/wireless notification system/annoying beep generation solution! Hexascroller was hacked together from donated LED panels for this past spring’s Interactive Party. It’s got six 30×7 LED displays, an Arduino Mega, a charmingly obnoxious loudspeaker, a DS1307+ RTC, and an XBee all hanging precariously from a wooden frame assembled with sturdy hot glue construction techniques. It’s hanging from a ceiling beam in our front room like some demented Flying Saucer of Damocles.

At the Interactive Party we had Hexascroller displaying tweets, but nowadays it primarily functions as a clock. You can use an XBee to connect to it if you need to scroll a message or make a horrible noise to draw attention to the message you’ve just scrolled. You can see it in action below:

As always, the source is up on GitHub. Enjoy!

This is the first of a series of classes to help Japan recover from the effects of the devastating earthquake and tsunami of March 11th. All proceeds from this class will be donated to the Japan Society’s earthquake relief fund: http://www.japansociety.org/earthquake

This Satuday, March 26th, from 1-5 pm we’ll be having one of our periodic, super-awesome Arduino and soldering 101 classes!  You’ll learn to solder!  You’ll learn to program!  You’ll learn to use microcontrollers!  In fact, you’ll walk out the door twenty times more talented and amazing than you were when you walked in– and you’ll take a an Arduino-compatible board you assembled yourself with you.

In this four hour class you’ll:

* Solder together a Freeduino board (an Arduino Duemilanove-compatible board)
* Learn how to program it using the Arduino environment
* Wire up several circuits and load up code to read sensors and light LEDs
* Understand variables, functions, and basic Arduino functionality
* And more!

When you leave, you’ll have a micro-controller, a mini-USB cable and a few programs to play with.

You’ll need to bring a laptop with the Arduino environment installed. It’s available for all platforms at http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Software. (If you don’t have access to a laptop, please drop us a line at [email protected] ahead of time and we’ll try to find a spare for the day.)

The class will be taught by NYC Resistor members Adam Mayer and Nick Vermeer.  Sign up here!