Headphone light show

el-wire-headphones

Seriously, nothing says 'Look at me!' like these headphones. [Yardley Dobon] added a rainbow of colored electroluminescent wire to his headphones and made them pulse to the music. The video after the break shows the headphones bumping to the tunes. This is one of two versions of the project, the other runs the EL wire along the headphone wire itself. We're a bit surprised that the high frequency … [Read more...]

Turning toy pianos into MIDI keyboards

MIDI

Building a MIDI device is always a great microcontroller project, and nearly everyone has an old toy keyboard lying around in the back of a closet or in the basement. [JenShen] decided to take one of these toy keyboards and build a MIDI keyboard. The keyboard [JenShen] used was a simple Casio keyboard with built-in voices. After tearing out the guts of the keyboard, the only thing that remained … [Read more...]

Glockentar: A Guitar + Glockenspiel Mashup

Glokentar

This unique electronic instrument combines a chopped up guitar and a hacked apart glockenspiel with an Arduino. [Aaron]'s Glockentar consists of guitar hardware and glockenspiel keys mounted to a wood body. Solenoids placed above the keys actuate metal rods to play a note. Under the hood, an Arduino connects the pieces. The conductive pick closes a circuit, which is a digital input into the … [Read more...]

Cheap biquad antenna extends LAN between apartments

extending-your-network-with-a-biquad-antenna

[Danilo Larizza] is sharing a network connection between a couple of apartments. They are not far apart, but they are also not right next to each other so a set of external antennas is necessary. He built this 2.4 GHz biquad antenna on the cheap (translated) just to test if it improved the signal before he tried to buy a proper antenna. It turns out to work well enough that this is all that he … [Read more...]

Injecting power into a WiFi dongle for the Raspberry Pi

injecting-power-to-rpi-wifi-dongle

So the Raspberry Pi sometimes doesn't have the juice needed to run power-hungry USB dongles. The most common issue is with WiFi adapters. The solution has long been to use a powered USB hub, but [Mike Worth] didn't want to take up that much extra space. The solution he worked out injects power directly into the dongle itself. The red and white wires coming out of the side provide the 5V source. … [Read more...]

RC truck has working windows, steering wheel, and much more

rc-car-shows-fantastic-mechanical-design

This truck is not simply a drive train and a radio module. Great care was taken to fabricate every part to work like a full-sized vehicle. NSFW WARNING: The forum on which the details have been posted is Russian and may have sidebar ads you don't want on your screen at work. That being said, here's the link (translated). The build starts with a custom-made frame which looks like it's … [Read more...]

Spare parts pulled together into a Nixie clock

spare-parts-nixie-clock

We'd like to dig around in [Small Scale Research's] parts bin. Apparently there's good stuff in there because he managed to build this Nixie tube clock using mostly leftovers. The chip driving the device is an ATtiny1634. We weren't familiar with it so here's a datasheet (pdf) if you're curios as well. The microcontroller communicates with an old GPS module in order to keep perfect time. There … [Read more...]