When [Ben Eater] talks, hackers everywhere listen. In his latest video [Ben] shows us how to make computer noises using square waves and a 6502 microprocessor.
[Ben] uses the timer in the W65C22 Versatile Interface Adapter to generate the square waves which generate a tone. He then adds support for a new BEEP command into his MS BASIC interpreter. We covered [Ben Eater]’s MS BASIC here at Hackaday back in April, so definitely check that out if you missed it.
Both small children and cats have a certain tendency to make loud noises at inopportune times, but what if there were a way to combine these auditory effects? This seems to have been the reasoning behind the creation of the Meowsic keyboard, a children’s keyboard that renders notes as cats’ meows. [Steve Gilissen], an appreciator of unusual electronic instruments, discovered that while there had been projects that turned the Meowsic keyboard into a MIDI output device, no one had yet added MIDI input to it, which of course spurred the creation of his Meowsic MIDI adapter.
The switches in the keys of the original keyboard form a matrix of rows and columns, so that creating a connection between a particular row and column plays a certain note. [Steve]’s plan was to have a microcontroller read MIDI input, then connect the appropriate row and column to play the desired note. The first step was to use a small length of wire to connect rows and columns, thus manually mapping connections to notes. After this tedious step, he designed a PCB that hosts an Arduino Nano to accept input, two MCP23017 GPIO expanders to give it enough outputs, and CD4066BE CMOS switches to trigger the connections.
Continue reading “Meowsic Keyboard MIDI Adapter Aims For Purrfection”
The Functionalist design philosophy that Dieter Rams brought to Braun from the 50s to the 90s still inspires the look of a few devices, including Apple’s iPod, Teenage Engineer’s synthesizers and recorders – and [2dom]’s IR7 streaming radio.
The streaming radio was inspired by Braun’s portable radios, particularly the SK2, TP1, and the T3 pocket radio. [2dom] started with the T3’s circular pattern of holes and experimented with several variations, finally settling on a cylindrical shape with a central display; a prototype with a low-power monochrome rectangular display was eventually rejected in favor of a circular LCD. The housing consists of four 3D-printed components: an upper and lower shell, a resonator for the speaker, and a knob for a rotary encoder.
Electronics-wise, an ESP32 handles the computing requirements, while the LCD and rotary encoder provide a user interface. For audio, it uses a VS1053 MP3 decoder, PAM8403 amplifier, and a wideband speaker, with an audio isolation transformer to clean up the audio. To reduce power consumption, a MOSFET cuts power to the peripheral components whenever the device is in sleep mode. The full design is available on GitHub.
The end result of this effort is a quite authentic-looking 21st-century adaptation of Rams’s original designs. If you’re interested in more Braun designs, check out this replica of one of their desk fans. We’ve also seen a restoration of one of Braun’s larger radios, the TS2.
Sometimes you find a commercial product that is almost, but not exactly perfect for your needs. Your choices become: hack together a DIY replacement, or hack the commercial product to do what you need. [Daniel] chose door number two when he realized his Yamaha MusicCast smart speaker was perfect for his particular use case, except for its tragic lack of line out. A little surgery and a Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC) breakout board solved that problem.
[Daniel] first went diving into the datasheet of the Yamaha amplifier chip inside of the speaker, before realizing it did too much DSP for his taste. He did learn that the chip was getting i2s signals from the speaker’s wifi module. That’s a lucky break, since i2s is an open, well-known protocol. [Daniel] had an Adafruit DAC; he only needed to get the i2s signals from the smart speaker’s board to his breakout. That proved to be an adventure, but we’ll let [Daniel] tell the tale on his blog.
After a quick bit of OpenSCAD and 3D printing, the DAC was firmly mounted in its new home. Now [Daniel] has the exact audio-streaming-solution he wanted: Yamaha’s MusicCast, with line out to his own hi-fi.
[Daniel] and hackaday go way back: we featured his robot lawnmower in 2013. It’s great to see he’s still hacking. If you’d rather see what’s behind door number one, this roll-your-own smart speaker may whet your appetite.
Another day, another Internet-connected gadget that gets abandoned by its creators. This time it’s Jooki — a screen-free audio player that let kids listen to music and stories by placing specific tokens on top of it. Parents would use a smartphone application to program what each token would do, and that way even very young children could independently select what they wanted to hear.
Well, until the company went bankrupt and shutdown their servers down, anyway. Security researcher [nuit] wrote into share the impressive work they’ve done so far to identify flaws in the Jooki’s firmware, in the hopes that it will inspire others in the community to start poking around inside these devices. While there’s unfortunately not enough here to return these devices to a fully-functional state today, there’s several promising leads.
Music consumption has followed a trend over the last decade or more of abandoning physical media for online or streaming alternatives. This can present a problem for young children however, for whom a simpler physical interface may be an easier way to play those tunes. Maintaining a library of CDs is not entirely convenient either, so [JakesMD] has created the Yaydio. It’s a music player for kids, that plays music when a card is inserted in its slot.
As you might expect, the cards themselves do not contain the music. Instead they are NFC cards, and the player starts the corresponding album from its SD card when one is detected. The hardware is simple enough, an Arduino Nano with modules for MP3 playback, NFC reading, seven segment display, and rotary encoder. The whole thing lives in a kid-friendly 3D printed case.
Some thought has been given to easily adding albums and assigning cards to them, making it easy to keep up with the youngster’s tastes. This isn’t the first such kid-friendly music player we’ve seen, but it’s certainly pretty neat.
In the era of digital streaming, the market is full of wireless speakers that will play content from your smartphone or pull it down from the Internet directly over WiFi. But if you’re feeling a bit nostalgic and want to throw on one of your old CDs, well, you might have a problem. That’s the situation [Chad Boughton] recently found himself in, so he decided to build a compact CD player that could discreetly connect up to his fancy Klipsch speaker.
The optical drive itself was the easy part, as [Chad] already had a laptop-style drive in an external enclosure that he could liberate. But of course, the speaker wouldn’t know what to do with an external disc drive, so there needed to be an intermediary. Enter the Raspberry Pi.
It might not look like it at first glance, but that’s a Pi 3 tucked into the back of the 3D printed frame. It would have been too tall in its original configuration, so [Chad] removed the USB and Ethernet ports; a modification we’ve covered in the past. Of course, he still needed to use the USB ports, so he ended up soldering the two cables — one to the CD drive and the other to the back of the speaker — directly to the Pi.
When plugged into the Raspberry Pi, the Klipsch speaker shows up as a USB audio device, so the software side of things was relatively simple. [Chad] installed VLC to handle CD playback, but he still needed a way to control everything. To that end, a IR receiver hooked up to the Pi’s GPIO pins means the Pi can detect the signals coming from the speaker’s original remote and pass the appropriate command on to VLC. The whole thing is very well integrated, and you could be forgiven for thinking it might be some kind of stock upgrade module at first glance.
Despite recently celebrating its 40th birthday, the CD is unlikely to completely disappear from our lives anytime soon. Manufacturers can turn their back on the standard if they want, but so long as folks still want to play them, they’ll keep coming up with inventive ways to make it happen.
Continue reading “Custom Slimline CD Player Hides Out Under Speaker”
