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?

We’ll let this bit of awesomeness speak for itself Check out all the Resistor cameos!

Learn more here!
http://arduinothedocumentary.org/

At a recent meeting I had a chance to sit down and check out Bill’s “Simple serial display” which, true to it’s name, is simple, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting one badly! Watch the vid to see it in action, and check out Bill’s earlier post for more info!

Music: Eric Skiff, Resistor Anthems – HHavoc Intro

Did you know that you can cut letter press relief or intaglio plates on the NYCR laser cutter? The laser cut acrylic holds a decent edge and is far less expensive than copper plate. Here is a short guide to how to make engraved invitations using the intaglio process:



First the plates need to be cut. Using inkscape with a thin font like Zapfino, layout the text and vector art. Briar Press is a great source for EPS that can be converted to PDF to import into inkscape. For intaglio process the etched or cut pieces will be black; relief process is the opposite.

I’ve had the best results with the text as solid black and raster cut at 80% power, 20% speed, while the artwork with fine lines were vector cut at 5% power, 10% speed. The cuts do not need to be very deep (unless you want to emboss without any ink), so the low speed is to ensure that the laser cutter’s steppers make smooth lines. I use my own GPL’ed epilog driver to give me better control over the cutting versus etching, but this should work fine with Corel as well. Here is a short video of the laser cutter as it vector cuts the mirror image text.

Which brings us to the first rule of making printing plates: Be sure to flip the entire page. Otherwise your prints will be backwards!

A second rule of making plates is to include registration marks on the outside border. The paper will be larger than the final size since it is very difficult to align while placing it on the plate. These registration marks can be used once the paper is dry to ensure that all the pieces have consistent centering.

And my third suggestions is that the piece of acrylic plate should be much larger than the oversized paper. It is easier to handle if it has extra space and produces better results if the paper is able to lay flat without being bent across the edge.

Scrub the plate after it is cut to remove any acrylic residue and dry it well. Then apply a small dollop of etching ink, such as Speedball Printmaster, to the plate. You don’t need very much, but there isn’t any harm in over applying. With practice you can figure out how much is necessary so that you don’t waste ink.

Using tarlatan cloth (or rough paper towels), wipe the ink into the etchings with circular motion until the entire plate is covered. A soft spatula can be used to help spread the ink, but metal ones can scratch the acrylic and leave unsightly marks on the resulting prints.

Using a clean piece of tarlatan or paper towel, wipe the plate clean with the same sort of circular motion. Occasionally refold the cloth to get a clean corner and keep wiping until it is spotless. The ink in the grooves won’t be picked up by the cloth, so keep scrubbing!

Using the adjustment knobs above the rollers, set the pressure setting on the press. This will require adjustments based on the thickness of the plate, the paper and the amount of padding. Be sure that both sides of the press have the same value and expect to do many experiments during the setup until the best height is found. Since there is no ⌘Z command, I like to make notes on the test pieces so that I have a way to revert to a previous setting.

Put the plate on the press with the ink side up and a slightly damp piece of oversized paper on the etched area. To dampen the paper I’ve found that the best results come from placing it between two wet paper towels for a few minutes while I ink the plate. Just like the pressure adjustment, expect to make a few dozen test prints before figuring out the right level of dampness. To prevent the paper from sticking to the sacrificial newsprint, I like to use a layer of aluminum foil above the paper.

Smoothly cover the plate and paper with the newsprint and felt, then crank the press’ wheel. Intaglio needs lots of pressure, so it will be difficult to push the plate through the roller. If the gear train skips, adjust the roller height to be 0.5 mm higher and try again.

Only run the paper and plate through once. If it is backed through the roller a second time there is a chance that the paper will skip and a second impression will be made.

Carefully lift the felt, newsprint and foil to reveal the printed paper. If all goes well, it will have transfered everything from the plate with no missed spots or water bleed.

But, for your first few plates it probably won’t be perfect. The one on the left was too dry and the paper was not pushed far enough into the etched grooves to pickup the ink. The one on the right was too wet and caused the water soluble ink to bleed. The one in the middle was just right. Re-ink the plate and give it another try.

If you realize that you’ve made a mistake in the artwork or text, rinse off all the ink, turn the plate over and use the laser to etch the other side. 3mm acrylic is strong enough that the etchings on the reverse side will not be transfered through, so you can reuse the piece.

Some inks aren’t right for etching. This Caligo Carbon Black formed “threads” when the paper was removed from the plate — the engraved ink should be smooth and shiny as it dries. Some inks don’t contain drying agents, so they will still rub off several weeks later. Also, for ease of clean up, you should only use water soluble inks.

Stay tuned for another blog post on relief printing, coming sometime soon.

New in the NYCR vending machines are Teensy 2.0 boards. They have ATMega32U4 chips, which have the built in USB drivers and, via LUFA, can appear as any USB device, not just a serial communications device. Want to make a MIDI device show up as a USB keyboard? Or a core memory as a mass storage device? You can do that! The USB doesn’t consume a UART, so there is still a serial port available for interfacing with GPS or other external RS232 devices.

PJRC makes the Teensyduino plugin for the Arduino IDE and a set of compatible libraries so that you can use it with your Arduino sketches. Or you can drop into straight C and take full advantage of all of the AVR pins.

Update: They are very popular! Three were bought during Craftnight tonight.

This weekend PMF and I cleaned an IBM 129 Card Data Recorder and were able to fairly reliably punch cards once we were done. When we started it would frequently jam during feeding, mis-feed during the punch, and not cleanly stack the cards in the output bin.

Most of the problem was thirty years of dust, card fiber and grime built up in the mechanisms. The output hopper was full of it and needed a good cleaning to reliably pick up cards into the output stack:

The card punch and keyboard only appear to be seated on the table. They are just the tip of the iceberg — much of the power and computerized bits fill the space underneath the desk. The bottom of the keyboard is in a cut-out in the desk surface and has a traditional typewriter mechanism that closes reed switches when each key is pressed, except for the special keys like “FEED”, “REL” and “REG” that directly actuate lever switches.

Luckily the “monolithic memory” was still fully functional. Debugging the logic part of the system would be an immense task — it is implemented with a wire-wrapped backplane and fills the bottom portion of the desk. Hidden behind it was a bookshelf with full schematics and a “Maintenance Theory” manual that described the interaction of the various components.

The individual boards in the backplane appear to be hand soldered and mostly consist of the what appears to be the same component, likely Solid Logic Technology blocks:

Once it was cleaned up, PMF tried puching some cards with great success:

We were able to verify that the registration of the cards and the punch were fairly accurate with this card guage:

The ink tape of the print head that marks a human readable version of the EBCDICHollerith Code was totally dry. Perhaps we can adapt a typewriter ribbon to work:

Also hidden in the bottom of the card punch was an incident report log, with the last entry from 1980. For a device manufactured starting in 1973 that is a very long life. The logbook is sitting on an IBM card sorter, which will be cleaned up later.

We ended up not using the IBM-6 Oil Spray:

Here’s a 1971 advertisement for the IBM 129 that notes its new features, including the monolithic memory, the ability to tabulate columns of the cards, and the automated card feeding, punching and stacking mechanisms:

And here are more photos and video of the card punch. Once we have the manuals scanned and cleaned up, I’ll post links, too.

UPDATE: Please attend NYTM’s SOS Jan. 18th, 12:30pm-2pm
Outside the Offices of Senator Charles Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand 780 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Please RSVP with NY Tech Meetup: http://nytm.org/sos/

As the saying goes:

Dear Congress, It’s No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works

Jan. 24th will be a big vote for the Internet. PIPA, SOPA’s twin will be voted on in the Senate. Here’s what we’re doing to let our Senators know they should reject PIPA on Jan. 24th. We are asking our 2 NY State Senators to have town hall meetings or an in-district meeting with us (you can request them but sometimes the request stuff like faxes). We don’t have a date for a meeting in NYC yet, because the Senators are on recess and it’s difficult to effectively schedule a date with an answering machine. New Yorkers, stay tuned, we’ll announce the date to meet with our Senators. If you’re not in New York – we urge you to contact your Senators for a town hall meeting or in-district meeting in your area before the Jan. 24th vote. Those of us who call the Internet home need to educate Congress on the dangerous nature of this Act, because srsly, do they get how DNS works? Or what xkcd is? We don’t think so.

The following is a citizen packet prepared by Public Knowledge: 

Tell Congress to Reject Internet Censorship Tools in PIPA

On January 24th the United States Senate will be voting on S. 968 the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). Your two Senators will have the opportunity to decide whether America will adopt the tools of censorship used to block websites in China or reject them by voting no and standing with Senators Wyden, Moran, Paul, and Cantwell. Ask your two Senators to stand against adopting the tools of censorship in any bill that comes up for a vote.

What you should know about PIPA:

• 83 of Internet’s original creators including Vint Cerf, co-designer of TCP/IP, and Robert W. Taylor, founder of ARPAnet, oppose SOPA and PIPA.
• The government has a poor track record of protecting free speech on the Internet. For example, lawful hip-hop music blog Dajaz1.com was held by the government for anentire year on the accusation of copyright infringement.

• Think tanks, government agencies, and industry associations across the political and social spectrum have said that SOPA and PIPA would undermine freedom of expression
• Top cyber security experts have said that SOPA and PIPA would undermine a 15 year government initiative (DNSSEC) to update Internet security.

• Human rights groups have told Congress that PIPA would help censorship regimes like China and Iran by sacrificing America’s fight for Internet freedom worldwide.

• Congress has yet to allow experts on free speech, network engineering, Internet security, or human rights testify at a hearing on PIPA.

• The content industry has spent $94 million in lobbying Congress to pass their bills in 2011, arguing that if China can censor the Internet the U.S. can also do it.

• Lobbyists have misled Congress by saying the United States already uses censorship tools for malware and child pornography.

Sample Town Hall Questions:

•  Will you stand with Senators Wyden, Moran, Paul and Cantwell and oppose Internet censorship on January 24th?
•  Do you understand what the Domain Name Server (DNS) system is and have you consulted with cybersecurity experts on the effects of the Protect IP Act?
•  Would you still vote for Protect IP if it restricts freedom of speech?
• Have you taken money from the movie and music industry?

Who Opposes SOPA/PIPA’s DNS Filtering Provisions (full list)?

Non-profit organizations and education institutions, including Public Knowledge, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and library groups like The American Association of Law Libraries, American College of Research libraries, the American Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries, and the Special Libraries Association. Other non-profit organizations opposed to the bill include the Future of Music Coalition, the Institute for Intellectual Property and Social Justice, the Internet Society and the Public Interest Registry.

A group of 41 “press freedom and human rights advocates,” including the Center for Media Justice, Free Press, and organizations from the European Union, Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, England, Finland, France, Germany, India, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and Sweden. Additionally, Human Rights Watch, Human Rights First, and Internews all oppose SOPA/PIPA’s filtering provisions.

83 Internet professionals, cybersecurity experts, and Internet engineers including Vint Cerf, the creator of TCP/IP, Paul Vixie, the author of BIND, Esther Dyson, the founding Chairman of ICANN, and Robert Taylor, an early ARPAnet innovator.

Founders of some of the most successful Internet companies: Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, Michell Baker, co-founder of Firefox, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and Square, Caterina Flake, co-founder of Flickr and Hunch, David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo!, Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, Arianna Huffington, co-founder of The Huffington Post, Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube, Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and co-founder of Alexa Internet, Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal, Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist, Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, Biz Stone, co- founder of Obvious and Twitter, Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation, Evan Williams, co-founder of Blogger and Twitter, and Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo!.

Think tanks such as the Brookings Institute and CATO Institute as well as consumer groups such as the Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union, and U.S. PIRG: The Federation of State PIRGs, and the Entertainment Consumers Association.

The Sandia National Labs under the Department of Energy and OpenDNS, “the largest DNS and Internet security service in the world.”

130 “entrepreneurs, founders, CEOs, and executives who have been involved in 283 technology start-ups,” including Chas Edwards of Digg, Chad Dickerson of Etsy, and Dennis Crowley of Foursquare.

55 venture capitalists from firms such as Union Square Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, and SV Angel.

Thanks Public Knowledge!!

As part of my on-going quest to fill my apartment (and hackerspace) up with semi-working 1970′s supercomputers, my effort to revive the Cray-1 supercomputer needs your help! Through the grapevine, I managed to get my hands on a genuine backup disk pack of the once-thought-extinct Cray Operating System (COS). Using my homebrewed disk reader I was able to make a copy of the disk, and the folks over at the internet archive (thanks Jason!) were kind enough to host it for me. Now is where you, kind reader, come in! Help me reverse-engineer the file system so I can recover the actual operating system files and take a step closer to towards booting this awesomely-useless machine!

Download it and get hacking!

The Simple Serial Display is a trivial accessory for your PC, Mac, or microcontroller to act as an always-on information display for whatever data you can serialize and push out of a traditional tty port.  Since I’m out of grad school on winter break, I decided to clean it up a bit and make it look nice.

This project came out of some hacking that Hilary Mason and I were doing back in ’09 for fun.  At Barcamp 2009, we presented it as a trivial project for anyone to build without complex electronics and with friendly Python and PySerial – a project within reach of any dev or sysadmin that might stare at progress bars.  One compelling use is to monitor long-running tasks, such as your mega MapReduce job.  The display includes an LED “flag” to alert you to whatever you care to be alerted about, such as the end of a job or an interruption, and the LCD panel can print simple progress bars or animated slash marks to track job completion.

The original design remains the same (specifications can be found in the Slideshare-hosted presentation below) leveraging a common FTDI brand serial cable (or similar,) and Sparkfun’s two line text LCD with their “Serial Backpack” adapter.

I dug around in the Resistor scrap bin and found a nice 6mm thick piece of clear acrylic, and used Zignig’s Box-o-Tron parametric box generator found on Thingiverse (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:404) to construct the enclosure. After some tweaks and prototyping with foamcore board, I came away with a delightfully tight design.  Considering this is my first project on the Epilog, I’m happy it didn’t require a lot of trial and error.

As with all casual projects, there’s a lot of room for improvement, but I’m pleased with the output of today’s effort.

Some friends at a local university reached out to us recently and offered to let us rescue a robot from a junkyard fate. Not being in the business of turning down free robots, we quickly agreed. Three of us showed up on Monday in a Ford Escape. We left in a U-Haul.

This beast of a machine weighs in at 550lbs. It’s a Gilson Cyberlab C400 Automated Plate Preparation Workstation. We’re not exactly sure what that is, but we do know that it has a huge robotic gantry meant to move at high speed with accurate positioning. And it has neuroprobes. What are we going to do with it? Maybe it will be the next BarBot. Or a 3D Printer. Or maybe some sort of exercise machine. We’re not sure yet. Check the vids.