Tengu Clone

posted Oct 22nd 2007 10:38pm by Will O'Brien
filed under: portable audio hacks

[Alex] sent in his clone of [Crispin Jones]‘ tengu. The tengu is essentially a funky visual sound meter that looks like it’s lip syncing. [Alex]‘s version is built around an ATMega48 microcontroller, an electric mic with a LM386 audio circuit and the required LED matrix display. There’s an example tengu video here – but I’m not sure what to say about the song in the demo. It’s not dependent on USB – it actually works better with the clean power provided by batteries anyway.

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3 Responses to Tengu Clone

davr says:

October 23, 2007 at 3:03 am

Thatâs pretty neat use of a LED matrix. I might see about doing something like that myself. I currently have a 8Ã8 bicolor LED matrix hooked up to an AVR, so far Iâve written a simple pong game.

A video is included here:
http://blog.davr.org/2007/09/24/avr-project-update/

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Pokey says:

October 23, 2007 at 9:26 am

Looking at the breadboards, I don’t see any bypass caps. Maybe he could get away with USB power if he threw 100uF across the bus bars of each board and .1uF near Vdd/Vss on the chips.

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norm says:

October 24, 2007 at 1:59 am

first time i heard of tengu and this is something i’ve been wanting for years now.. the clone lacks the “bling” original has, (probably due to designers being involved in the original and all) and both can use a little more fine tuning of responses but overall, this is the coolest “world can do without” item i’ve ever seen..

p.s. i actually considered buying a tengu but the website is completely in japanese with no english preference and my link reading skills were only so much..

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