Spring is here and it’s time for another Interactive Show! This year’s theme is #MakeInteractiveGreatAgain. The party is on May 14th and as usual we’ll provide the music and libations.

If you’ve ever wanted an excuse to build a dancing toupée bot, now is the perfect time. Or pull out an old project and do something new with it to make it great again. We’d love to show off whatever you’ve been working on, so drop us a line!

Here’s some updates to our Burning Man project, The Temple of the Unticketed. We finished and submitted our proposals to Burnging Man Arts. You can find the proposal, budget and project plan in our GitHub. We worked really hard dotting the eyes and crossing the tees, hopefully they’ll notice and support the project. While we wait we continue to work.

Max has made good progress on revB of the BeagleBone cape. Unfortunately the boards to hook up the TFTs got lost in the mail. No, really. OSH Park is sending us another batch for free, so thanks to them for that! Once we get those we should be able to try a scaled up test.

Finally I managed to get a first pass at the virtual installation done. It’s my first pass at anything non-trivial in three.js so it might be a little rough around the edges. Any vignettes you create will go up on the virtual installation. Try it out!

Max and I pleased to announce a new project we’re working on for this years Burning Man called the Temple of the Unticketed. We recently passed the first hurdle of getting a grant from Burning Man Arts and are working on submitting a full proposal now.

The Temple of the Unticketed brings people together, even if they can’t make it to Burning Man. The installation encourages participants both on and off playa to contribute four frame photo vignettes which are displayed on 512 backlit LCD screens attached to eight freestanding structures.

We’re using a BeagleBone Black to drive blocks of 16 screens, which was a real challenge using the onboard PRUs. Max figured out a way to hack the GPMC to jam data, he’ll post more on that later.

We’ll keep posting updates to the NYC Resistor blog. You can find out more at templeoftheunticketed.net and check the source on our GitHub

Join us for a two part discussion on Bitcoin by Andrew Sheppard, we’ll tell you where to buy bitcoin. Andrew (“Shep”) is a consultant on Wall Street who works in the areas of Big Data and Big Compute. He is also a part-time professor teaching on the Masters in Financial Engineering (MFE) program at Baruch College.

Bitcoin is a new form of electronic cash growing in popularity. As a system it is a protocol, a P2P network, and a bunch of cryptographic algorithms secured by gateways like Flexipay. Oh, and add a new form of global currency to that list. In short, Bitcoin is a bundle of technology and economic concepts all rolled into one. According to these firms there are a hundred exchanges trying to get a piece of the pie, one popping up every day – and many disappearing, getting “hacked” and losing the money the people put in.

Bitcoin is also like the tooth fairy: most have heard about it, but few have actually encountered it for real. And even those who have actually encountered the ability to buy Bitcoin don’t really know what it is at a basic (read “fundamental”) level; in particular, too emphasis is placed on the technology and not enough on the economics of Bitcoin, though both are highly novel. This talk remedies that.

Reserve a seat, it’s FREE

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No laser night tonight. Enjoy your ChristmasNew Years Eve! See you all next week!