Electronic Guitar Pick Tunes The Strings For You

November 23, 2009 by Mike Szczys 25 Comments

The Stimmmopped is an electronic guitar tuner made to be used as a guitar pick. This uses two LEDs synchronized to blink at the exact frequency of the string you are tuning. Pluck the string with the corner of the PCB and then shine the light on the string you are tuning. As the vibrating string moves back and forth it will only pick up the spot of light when the frequency matches that of the blinking LED. Once in tune, both red lights will appear to be constantly illuminated and immobile on the string.

An Atmel ATmega8 is used to control the device, interfacing with two buttons and a seven-segment display to choose the pitch currently being tuned. Gibson has a robotic guitar that features an auto-tuning mode, but if you don’t want to shell that much this low cost and simple build is for you.

[Thanks Sören]

CNC Circuit Board Fabrication

November 23, 2009 by Mike Szczys 35 Comments

[Jonathan Ward’s] pcb mill is as impressive as it is inexpensive. Twenty-six plywood parts, labeled A-Z, are used to assemble the machine along with the customary precision rods, stepper motors, and router assembly. His bill of materials prices the unit at $458.18, a small price to pay in order to forgo a multi-step etching process.

His test board shows some fairly fine pitch that could turn out most home-project circuit boards. We’ve contacted [Jonathan] regarding the specifics of milling the plywood parts out of a 2 foot by 4 foot sheet of plywood. Watch for an update with any information he’s willing to share. We hope he’ll make the milling files for the plywood parts available so that you can build a copy of the device for your own use.

[Thanks Charles]

SparkFun Product Used For Immoral Hacking

November 23, 2009 by Jakob Griffith 43 Comments

While we have our fun ethically hacking, its very easy to forget that sometimes our ideas could be used with malicious goals. Take for instance SparkFun’s BlueSMiRF – the device’s original intention is simply to act as a wireless serial cable replacement. After hackers discovered several PIN pads use a serial interface, they put one and one together to steal several hundreds of people’s personal bank accounts.

It seems SparkFun is getting a lot of heat lately, but we’re glad they stand up and address these issues. You can check out the original news clipping here.

Automatic Pneumatic Drum Kit

November 23, 2009 by Jake W 16 Comments

Move over Steve and PEART… there’s yet another robotic drummer in town. [Fauzii] tipped us off to his own MIDI-controlled creation – WizardFingers. According to him, WizardFingers is already capable of 64th note rolls at over 250 beats per minute. That’s on every drum simultaneously. Each drum is hit with a lever attached to a linear pneumatic actuator. A laptop running MAX/MSP generates MIDI sequences, which are sent to Doepfer MTC64 board. All of these actuators are hooked up to the board, which sets them off in sequence.

[Fauzii] ultimately hopes to develop AI software that will allow WizardFingers to compose its own tunes on not only a drum kit, but bar chimes and an organ as well. His site documents the whole concept quite well (just watch out for wild cats).

Building Capacitive Sensitive Floor Tiles

November 22, 2009 by Mike Szczys 38 Comments

That title’s a mouthful but you’re already familiar with the technology and application of foot pads as sensors in games like Dance Dance Revolution. The usbddr project sought to make a USB connected DDR controller from scratch. The microcontroller used is an Atmel ATmega8 running the V-USB firmware for connectivity and uses the analog to digital converts to read in data from the capacitive sensors.

The physical implementation is cleaver. The base plate has a capacitor plate attached to the top of it and the tile has the other capacitor plate attached to the bottom of it. The two are separated by some weather-stripping which is spongy enough to allow compression, bringing the two capacitor plates together.

We’re not convinced of the long-term durability of the system. We certainly don’t think it will hold up to very much hard-core DDR playing. But we would love to see a Super Mario RPG style puzzle to unlock the door to the ‘castle’ at a child’s birthday party.

[Thanks Hans]

Hackaday Links: Sunday November 22

November 22, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 12 Comments

Hacklab’s laser cutter got the customary musical treatment. You can see it play the theme from mario brothers here. It’s nothing new to us, but we still enjoy seeing it done.

Ever been curious how a pole transformer is made? Quench that curiosity with this educational video. [via HackedGadets]

Here’s a quasi humanoid robot that is designed to be your workout trainer. He’ll show you the exercises, give you motivational and encouraging pep talks and even play games with you. We think the idea sounds good, but in execution, he flails his arms and randomly says creepy insincere sounding things like “I’m having fun. I could play this game all day long. I’m having too much fun.” That’s just creepy.

[Mr. Nelson] got sick of walking all the way down the hall just to see if there was anyone in the bathroom. His solution was to build this massively overdone indicator light system. It uses a proximity sensor located in each bathroom to determine occupied status and has a fantastic industrial look.

If you’ve ever wanted to get into 3d photography you’ll be pleased to see this writeup on how to build a simple rig and compile the images for different viewing methods.

We were amazed by these beautifully crafted brass machines. The one in this video is solar powered and seems to run pretty smoothly. Not bad for something that was all hand crafted from sheets of brass.

Be careful with this one folks. This video shows how to melt a beer bottle in your microwave. We’re not sure why you would want to, but we sure enjoyed watching it happen. Maybe that’s reason enough.

Build A Camera Boom At Less Than A Grand

November 21, 2009 by Mike Szczys 25 Comments

The folks at The Geek Group built a camera crane for less than $1000. In the video embedded after the break a presenter takes you through the different parts that make up the boom and how it is operated. This feels like something from a Junkyard Wars challenge as most of the parts are scavenged or from an industrial surplus store. Don’t let that sour your opinion, what they’ve ended up with is amazingly functional.

The base of the unit is a rolling tripod used for television cameras from around the 1960’s. The aluminum boom attaches to the base with a few large bearings and features a fine tuning balance system. The camera mount is motorized and can be moved using a joystick or set to scan automatically. It’s nice to see more examples of custom camera mounts. Obviously this isn’t a build for everyone, but as cameras and camera equipment become more readily available it makes high quality video production available for the masses, not just the networks.

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