[serdef] is clearly just having a little bit of fun here. One never needs a whiteboard pen that’s syncronized by MIDI to dance along with the theme from Duke Nukem.

But if you had all of the parts on hand (a highly liquid MIDI-driven relay board that connects straight up to a soundcard, some muscle wire, tape, and a whiteboard pen, naturally) we’re pretty sure that you would. You can watch the dancing pen in a video below the break.

The project is really about documenting the properties of [serdef]’s muscle wire, and he found that it doesn’t really contract enough with a short piece to get the desired effect. So he added more wire. We’ve always meant to get around to playing with muscle wire, and we were surprised by how quickly it reacted to changing the voltage in [serdef]’s second video.

Now the dancing pen isn’t the most sophisticated muscle wire project we’ve ever seen. And that award also doesn’t go to this Nitinol-powered inchworm. Did you know that there’s muscle wire inside Microsoft’s Surface?