first post.

in all seriousness, however, that’s pretty cool; don’t have a scanner or i’d try it out myself.

Posted at 11:06 am on Jan 8th, 2006 by mrdelayer

that’s wicked awesome, too bad I don’t have an HP ScanJet 3c or 4c, just a PSC 750 and it don’t work on that. This is really similar to the dot-matrix printer orchestra at http://www.hackaday.com/entry/1234000453045067/

Posted at 11:19 am on Jan 8th, 2006 by william

Holy shit! once my father told me that our HP3500c played some kind of “happiness hymn” (ok ok, remember that my english is a shit)…i thought it was just a coincidence.

Posted at 11:46 am on Jan 8th, 2006 by rockarolla

Thats so gross!

When do we get to see a scanned image produce during this process?

Posted at 11:58 am on Jan 8th, 2006 by James Dolan

Absolutely Ridiculous, But Completely Sweet.

Very interesting that there is an actual play music function hidden in the driver…

Posted at 12:46 pm on Jan 8th, 2006 by Jimmy D

Now only if it could scan a sheet of music and reproduce it!

Posted at 1:17 pm on Jan 8th, 2006 by Captsnuffy

some of the best stuff ive seen in awhile! In Computer Science we just wrote so program to like interpert mp3s and play them, the first steps where getting it to play single frequencies then cords, the first song we played, fur elise. You could take like 4 of these and get them to do cords, then teach them to play stairway to heaven, LED ZEPPLIN!

Posted at 1:51 pm on Jan 8th, 2006 by alkzy

you know, I’m learning the piano, and that scanner can play the song better than me. i’m not sure what to think.

Posted at 1:58 pm on Jan 8th, 2006 by dirk

Actually you can do that with any dc motor and even with an stepper motor (not sure but maybe even with a servo too) Using the PWM at certain frequencies the stator housing of a dc motor will vibrate (specially when the voltage is not high) to produce an audible sound. I imagine this is what the “trick” uses to make sound. Try it your self with a pic, say 16f87x, and a china’cheapo dc motor.

Posted at 2:33 pm on Jan 8th, 2006 by Pzyke 0'g3n

I found this to be really cool. Unfortunatly, My scanner is a ScanJet 2400, so it won’t work for this. Now, if it could scan pages while playing songs, scanning stacks of paper would be much more interesting!

Posted at 2:45 pm on Jan 8th, 2006 by ryan

This is cool as hell, but really really really old.

Posted at 3:00 pm on Jan 8th, 2006 by Lank

Damn, I wish people would tell me when the pull stuff from Digg: http://digg.com/hardware/Play_music_with_your_scanner

This tip was submitted anonymously.

Posted at 5:36 pm on Jan 8th, 2006 by Eliot Phillips

this is rad. it would be cool in conjunction with printer music and the CRT transmitter.

p.s. you run a kick ass site. The stuff is bound to be somewhere else too. it’s great to come here and find this stuff. and to the peeps who are constantly complaining in the comments, if you don’t like it, don’t read it… but either way shut your mouth because nobody cares or wants to hear you whine “oh wahhhhhhh i saw this last year, wahhhh this is on another site, wahhh you did somethin similar last month”. just be thankful this site is here at all.

Posted at 8:02 pm on Jan 8th, 2006 by mike

Actually eliot, this story appeared on MAKE before it was submitted to digg. In fact, the guy who submitted it seems to have done the same with a lot of make stories. Either way all these good stories get put on all the blogs and new sites anyway, so it doesn’t really matter.

Posted at 8:31 pm on Jan 8th, 2006 by Captsnuffy

Oh, whoops, usually I don’t run stories that appear on MAKE, since most people read that site as well. Some how I missed this one though.

Posted at 8:43 pm on Jan 8th, 2006 by Eliot Phillips

thats cool. just tried those easter eggs (really the same egg) on my 5p. now if i could get that program to compile.

Posted at 9:44 pm on Jan 8th, 2006 by spock

The software to play music on the scanner used to be included in the standard install back in the NT/Win95 days. I remember the first time I discovered it. Thought it was the best thing ever. More proof that old-school HP used be really good company.

If you can find the original NT driver software, you can likely get the software.

Posted at 10:22 pm on Jan 8th, 2006 by Gus

Come on, it’s a guy offscreen on a casio.

Just kidding.

My Dual Alpha server 5000 can play music in BIOS, I forget what it plays though, I haven’t used it lately since it is such a power hungry beast. Essecntially, the BIOS is just a small unix shell.

Posted at 12:14 am on Jan 9th, 2006 by acidrain

I can’t stop watching the video, its that cool, I wonder what Beethoven would have thought.

Posted at 12:47 am on Jan 9th, 2006 by steven

Hahaha, cool! this reminds me of my C64 days were you could have your discdrive play music as well programming the step motor..

Posted at 5:58 am on Jan 9th, 2006 by vince wheeler

This is nothing new; the ScanJet 4c actually came with a Windows 3.x program that had five or six songs that HP included on the driver disk. I still have my 4c and will try to dig out the driver 3.5″ if I can find it, will post the software.

Posted at 9:39 am on Jan 9th, 2006 by Jason Gill

http://www.eeggs.com/tree/1191.html

A good place where these were documented before as well.

Posted at 11:59 am on Jan 9th, 2006 by Deezil

The classic of course: http://www.sat.qc.ca/the_user/dotmatrix/en/intro.html

symphony for dot matrix printers :)

Posted at 12:02 pm on Jan 9th, 2006 by hypatia

how about a real POWER balard?

http://www.renaultf1.com/en/car/engine/index.php?news=tcm:3-41673

Posted at 12:06 pm on Jan 9th, 2006 by Adrian

This may explain the HP scanner we received a few years ago — we tried to install the software from the cd only to discover that it was in fact an Ella Fitzgerald album, masquerading as software! Luckily, we had purchased two scanners and the second one had software on it.

Posted at 12:54 pm on Jan 9th, 2006 by Mike Lynch

w00t!

slashdot:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/06/01/09/1413257.shtml?tid=222&tid=1

Posted at 2:56 pm on Jan 9th, 2006 by goliathdrakken

Reminds (and dates me) of setting a AM radio next to my Altar 8008 and programming different length loops to create “pitches” in the noise on the AM radio. Took about a week to program “Jingle Bells”. Awesome!

Posted at 3:09 pm on Jan 9th, 2006 by Rob donker

I’ve put the video file of ‘F

Posted at 3:32 pm on Jan 9th, 2006 by gargleroadside

Hahahaha, my dad has an old HP Scanje 4c. I am so gonna snag that and have some fun. Muwahahahahahah

Posted at 6:26 pm on Jan 9th, 2006 by Giuliano

Anybody have a mirror of the video?

Posted at 4:16 am on Jan 10th, 2006 by Architectonic

^ Re: Anybody have a mirror of the video? ^

Try the link given in comment #28 above.

Posted at 6:02 am on Jan 10th, 2006 by gargleroadside

Not only is this a function of the scanner and not really a “hack”, the original magazine articles are documented on HP’s site. I have one of these scanners on a shelf somewhere, so I figured I would take E up on their challenge and encode Paul’s Boutique… Needless to say, it’s way more work than I want to attempt. That’s one reason the video is of Fur Elise and not something else.

f

Posted at 3:57 pm on Jan 12th, 2006 by fever

Now that is a cool hack
but I tell you what would make it better
is if played the star wars theme tune in the video

then it wouldnt be cool
it would fucking rock

Posted at 6:41 pm on Jan 14th, 2006 by shane

Now that is a cool hack
but I tell you what would make it better
is if played the star wars theme tune in the video

then it wouldnt be cool
it would fucking rock

Posted at 6:42 pm on Jan 14th, 2006 by shane

does anyone know how to do this on a USB scanner? If there’s a way to do it on a Umax Astra, does anyone know about it (or know how to write it)?

Posted at 8:00 pm on Jan 14th, 2006 by Qays

i tried this on my usb HP PCS1350xi AND IT REBOOTED MY COMPUTER! muahahah i guess thats what i get for screwing around with my scanner!

Posted at 4:47 pm on Feb 23rd, 2006 by chronic_the_hodog

Very cool, but not new. The origional HP ScanJet (before they started adding numbers and letters to them) came with a program called SJBOX (DOS program) and half a dozen or so files that played music. Playing music on your scanner is still cool though. I used to work for HP and still play french horn in the HP orchestra. One of our members has written a couple of songs based on the sounds made by various pieces of office equipment, such as laser printer duplexers and such.

Posted at 3:17 pm on May 24th, 2006 by Nick stefanisko