For whatever reason we all seem to have this obsession with making things other than speakers into speakers. Hard drives, floppy drives, CD drives, fax machines, inanimate objects, dot-matrix printers, and now — well let’s stay with times — a 3D printer!
[Andrew Sink] wanted to give stepper music a try (is that seriously a genre now? (Yes, we’re calling it Stepstep – Ed.)), so he found HomeConstructor.de, which happens to have an awesome MIDI to G-CODE converter specifically designed for making those steppers hum. His instrument of choice is an original Printrbot but unfortunately it did require a few hours of tweaking the G-Code to get it to work just right.
Feast your ears on this beautiful rendition of the Jurassic Park Theme song below.
Not useless cool enough for you? How about a calculator playing music on a floppy drive? A CNC machine music factory? No? How about some freakin’ lasers playing the Super Mario Bros theme?
I had a few days tinkering with homeconstructor and midi files. I found that ones with fewer channels tended to come out, so rave music or techno with lots of instruments, not so good, classic simpler stuff, better. The entertainer that is for download played great but not very original to use.
The first real thing I did on my linux cnc project was make it play blue danube because that was the docking music from the c64 version of elite, and big things moving gracefully suited it. But my camera work sucks, and the mill is far from finished or polished, the screen looks especially odd because its a laptop lcd with a extra driver board added on, then a wrong sized digitizer slapped on afterwards.
After a couple of days, Ive got it out my system and now it can be used for more useful stuff though. Dodgy camera phone youtube, at least my steppers didnt let the magic smoke out during the complex bits :-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLFVHN67na0
I think the real hero in all this is the guy who wrote the code behind homeconstructor.de itself, we are all just button clicking submitters in comparison.
It occured to me to run it on my printrbot too (the white nema34 endcaps everyone notices were printed off on it), but then, Id got it out my system by then!
Looks like HaD are not actually ‘staying with the times’ as many people were doing this with the first ‘commercial’ sold 3D printers from makerbot – the cupcake. To those that are interested in more, there are many links to gcode files as well as a midi to cnc converter available here: http://makerbot.wikidot.com/makerbot-music. Songs featuring Wallace and Gromit theme tune and Staying Alive from Portal – no cake tho!
Good jurassic park tho.
This is Hackaday, not Literallyneverbeendonebeforeaday, or Cuttingedgeinnovationaday. “This has been done before” is not actually a criticism.
If you like the genre, please check out my printer/scanner/floppy orchestra playing Wizards in Winter: http://hackaday.io/project/3533-christmas-orchestra Thanks. :)
eh, it’s been done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZX0ewZqCctA&feature=youtu.be
now plz develop a software to play this music while actually printing. Adjust the print pattern to get some melody – that would be nice =)