Improvised Timekeeping Device (@phooky)

You may have read about Ahmed Mohamed, the 14 year old boy who was arrested Monday for bringing a clock to school. Ahmed built his own digital clock out of spare parts on Sunday night and brought it to school on Monday to show his Engineering teacher. He was arrested – wearing his NASA shirt – after his English teacher claimed it “looks like a bomb.”

Join us in standing with Ahmed and promoting Engineering in schools on Thursday night by making your own DIY clock. Browse our junk drawers, grab some LEDs, and slap together your best Improvised Timekeeping Device. We have plenty of soldering irons and there will be people around to help out if you’re new with electronics. Philosophers will also be on hand if you have trouble with the concept of time itself.

Follow Ahmed’s situation on Twitter.

Craft Night is one of NYC Resistor’s weekly open-to-the-public nights.  We’ll be there from about 6:30 p.m. until time stops making sense, at 87 3rd Ave (and Bergen Street) in Brooklyn, just a few blocks from the Atlantic Ave / Barclays Center subway stop.

Last weekend was the awesome Art Hack Day hackathon, organized in part by Resistor member David Huerta and Resistor friend Shayna Gentiluomo. Artists from all over were invited to the awesome Pioneer Works space in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where they met, brainstormed, and executed on a wide array of ideas spanning many mediums, in less than 48 hours.

I showed up uninvited, glued a Beaglebone Black to a Pringles can, and ended up with a note on Makezine:

Built with an A-version BeagleBone Black, this WiFi Taser by Max Henstell turned a Pringles can into an antenna gun of sorts, using Python to send deauth packets to knock nearby laptops off wi-fi.

Resistor member Adam Mayer and 3D artist Bradley Rothenberg put together this awesome robot utilizing a broken security camera that I rescued off the Google building after Hurricane Sandy:

Last Robot Left Alive, by Bradley Rothenberg and Adam Mayer. The installation postulated the resurrection of a broken security camera that fell to the ground, likely due to wind sheer from Hurricane Sandy.

Resistors Olivia Barr and Ariel Cotton were also present to whip up a cool robot, a trash-creature from the Gowanus Canal.

My silent favorite of the show wasn’t operating optimally, but I know where this one comes from. Monster Mash, by Olivia Barr and Ariel Cotton, turned upcycled junk into a creature from the Gowanus Canal, a nearby Superfund site with record levels of pollutants.

Check out the rest of the awesome projects over at the Makezine writeup of Art Hack Day: Deluge.

On Friday night I experienced what is probably my most spectacular hardware failure yet. I was working on a project for our upcoming Interactive Show, a chandelier with 150 or so individually controllable 5 watt incandescent bulbs:

A small piece of the chandelier during testing.

Anyway, it was way too late and I was rushing to get the last controller board finished on the outer ring of the chandelier, which has 7 controllers and 52 lightbulbs. I plugged the very last controller in backwards and flipped the switch…
Continue reading »

There will be no Craft Night on July 4th whilst we celebrate our liberation from, and eventual conquest of, the British.

Suggested alternatives:
• Restore the Fourth NYC
• Fireworks
• Rainbows

Go here! Sign up! Learn how to Arduino!

It’s like the previous Arduino post, except that it’s this coming Saturday instead of having already happened. Unless you read this after Saturday, in which case, boy oh boy, you sure did miss an excellent Arduino class. Best one I’ve been to, that’s for sure.