Tired Of Playing The MacBook? Play The Raspberry Pi!

pithingy

Hit up any club, party, or get together where musicians are present and you’ll probably find a DJ booth stacked to the gills with faders, various MIDI devices, and a MacBook. However abundant an OS X-based DJ platform is, we haven’t heard hide nor hare of a Raspberry Pi being used as a sequencer, MIDI device, or MaxMSP box.

[James] over at Illuminated Sound put together a great tutorial for making all those cool electronic music devices play nice with a Raspberry Pi. He used a Novation Launchpad, an 8×8 MIDI controller that can act as faders, a keyboard, or even a functional equivalent to the pads on an MPC.

Hardware is nothing without software, so [James] used Puredata and libusb to turn the MIDI data into notes and audio effects.

[James] added a download that includes the Launchpad driver and a Puredata sketch to test everything out. You can see how it all fits together in the video after the break.

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Plastic Sword Detects WiFi-enabled Orcs

sword

For a few years now, [Jomegat] has been thinking about Sting, the sword wielded by [Bilbo Baggins] and later [Frodo] in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Sting glows blue whenever an orc is near. Assuming the Elvish magic created by Tolkien is in reality highly advanced Elvish technology, [Jomegat] figured out a way to make his plastic Sting detect WiFi-enabled orcs.

Since The Hobbit was released, toy stores have been flooded with related merchandise that included a wonderful toy version of everyone’s favorite orc killing weapon. The only problem was how to add orc sensors to this plastic Sting. [Jomegat] assumed all orcs carry a cell phone, and being the low creatures they are, would always have their WiFi turned on. [Jomegat] found a very inexpensive WiFi detector key chain that would sense these phone-carrying orcs and light up to alert our warrior to imminent danger.

After acquiring the materials crafted from Elvish magic technology, [Jomegat] opened up the plastic hilt of Sting and installed the WiFi detector. Now, whenever Sting senses the preferred wireless connection of the orc, the blade glows a bright blue.

[Jomegat] was eaten by a grue shortly after completing this project.