… and after one small step, two men would stare out across what one of them called “magnificent desolation”. Orbiting overhead another man would keep vigil, as on earth half of a billion people were riveted to television screens receiving broadcasts of events as they unfolded on what had been until that moment a dreamscape. Kings, Tyrants, and Leaders relegated to awestruck spectators. We were there all of us explorers, and to us that grand frontier that has sat elusive in our night sky, forever a source of inspiration and hope, was finally so very close to us. We dared to dream, and we dared to make that dream real.

I hope that I will some day look on as mankind takes it’s first steps onto a planet that is not our own. That would be the greatest.

Some would say it was Engineers, and Scientists that got us to the moon. That’s no more true than saying it was America or John F Kennedy who got us there. So many people have given of themselves down through the centuries, some giving everything. Apollo was everyone’s. This anniversary belongs to all of us. So, enjoy the wonder, the excitement, and the pride all over again. Enjoy it while it lasts, because some day soon we’ll be sitting glued to televisions and lcds as men and women of earth step out onto the vastness of Mars.

PS:

Check it out: here. Not sure who put all the effort into making this, but lord knows it’s amazing. And Hacking the AGC would be a very appropriate way to spend this anniversary at a hackerspace.

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

Come to Resistor on Saturday to learn about Ableton Live, one of the most versatile DAWs for composition, production and live performance.  The class will provide you with all the knowledge necessary to start making music with Ableton Live.

We’ll go over the interface, MIDI and Ableton’s native synths, recording live audio, sampling, optimizing CPU performance, tempo manipulation, using Ableton’s effects and AU/VST plug-ins, and more.  We’ll also discuss basics of sound design, and useful methods for arranging and performing music in Ableton.  Finally, we’ll discuss ways to sync Live with external programs.  We’ll make our own tracks, jam, and discuss different approaches to composition, production and live performance.

Bring your laptops, load up the trial version, and come on down!

Hope to see you there!  2-4 PM, this Saturday.

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.

About Jon

Jon Santiago is co-founder and co-director of STEM2GETHER, an educational services cooperative that helps schools and community based organizations create hands-on enrichment programs that promote knowledge in Science, Technology, Engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Previously Jon has worked with Sustainable South Bronx, where he launched a FabLab in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is co-creator of the NSF supported GreenFab program, which introduces students to design and engineering in the context of environmental sustainability. Jon has an SB in Mathematics from MIT where he worked with the FabLab program, a global initiative to bring digital fabrication laboratories to communities around the world. He is also a member of NYC Resistor, a Hacker Space in Downtown Brooklyn where people meet regularly to share tech knowledge and build community.

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.

You can buy the cars as ready-to-run products, but many racers customize theirs and/or build their own from the ground up, choosing the best components, and tweaking them for the best performance. The cars we saw were mostly made with components from Koford Engineering, and the controllers were from DiFalco Design, although apparently there are other companies serving this market as well. The fastest ultra-light cars we saw cost as much as $500.

Buzz has a good stock of generic aluminum and brass bar stock, motors, electrodes, dremel bits, lubricant, etc., behind the counter, so this could be a handy resource for local hobbyists and hackers building other electro-mechanical gadgets as well.

Buzz-a-rama is only open on weekends, and it is closed for two months in the summer starting tomorrow, but if you get a chance, stop by and check it out. It’s worth the trip:

Buzz-A-Rama
69 Church Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11218-3791
(718) 853-1800
View in Google Maps

Some more photos are in my Flickr Buzz-A-Rama Set. You can read more about Buzz-A-Rama at nytimes.com and kensingtonbrooklynblog.com

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 hamradio@makerbot.com 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.