La Guitare à Crayon

July 15, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 15 Comments

As with most electronic musical instruments, we saw this in the tip box and expected the usual random noises to show off the instruments range. Consider us pleasantly surprised. They cut strait to it and showed us what la Guitare à crayon really is. It is an instrument of both audio and visual art. You draw while you play. The guitar appears to have a wacom attached to the front where you would normally strum. different areas of the wacom seem to effect the music much like a string being plucked. In one of the videos we see some fret board action as well. Watching the screen, we can see that she is drawing a picture, and we are in fact hearing that picture being drawn. The site has a section for source code, but states that it will only posted if there are requests. We are officially requesting it, we want one. May we suggest some improvements? Get some color variation, possibly opacity too. Gimp can do it with the wacom. We can’t wait to see how this project matures. How about another video? Watch it after the break.

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Live Android

July 14, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 23 Comments

504x_androidvirtural (Custom)

Excited about google Chrome? Can’t wait? Why not play with google’s other OS, Android. You can now run Android from a live cd on any X86 computer. Just pop it in and go without any damage to your existing data. They’ve already gotten it working on the EEE_701, let’s see one with touch screen installed.

Building A Snorricam

July 14, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 33 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoZOe3gOkco]

With digital cameras getting cheaper and higher quality, we find ourselves more capable of using them to make videos. A Snorricam can be a very useful tool if you like the effect it produces. This specific design allows for adjustment of the height and angle of the camera allowing for even more possibillities. As you can see in the video after the break, it seems to work pretty well. It might be nice to add some kind of vibration absorbtion though. Anyone got any ideas on that?

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4 LED RGB Controller

July 13, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 2 Comments

4rgbled-angle-rainbow_thumb (Custom)

[Steven] was inspired by the BlinkM and Shiftbrite modules, but really wanted something that could be controlled via RS232. He decided to build his own RGB LED module capable of PWM that fit his needs. He’s using a PIC16F628 microcontroller as the base. Each module has 4 individually addressable LEDs with multiple intensities for each color. The units can be daisy chained as well. The schematics and PCB files are available on his site for download.

[via Hacked Gadgets]

The Prism: Laser Synth-Guitar

July 13, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 23 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HP2zbGes2Bg]

This is an interesting instrument. Part laser harp, part guitar, the Prism seems to have some potential. [Jeff-o] put some major time and effort into refinishing a guitar, building the circuit and putting it all together. He did a great job, the instrument looks fantastic and appears to work. We do have a request though; please post a video of it being played as an instrument. So many of these electronic instrument projects just spit out random noises. While we understand that some people are into that, we would love to hear some control. How about intentionally changing notes to make a melody? Based on the description, it should have control for pitch, and even speed of the oscillation. So let’s hear some music. We don’t care if you’re any good, just please play some music with it. If you would like to build your own, he has the schematics and PCB layout available for download.

Photo Interrupters Explained

July 12, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 20 Comments

img_0147 (Custom)

[Eric] sent in this very informative writup on how to use Photo interrupters. These things can be used for many things, he lists pellet dispensing and limit switches. He found one in his junk box and realized he knew very little about it. After some exploring and research, he’s here to educate the rest of us. There’s a good breakdown of the circuit itself which is pretty simple as well as a test circuit and some sample code.

Strobit Wireless Widget Project

July 11, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 10 Comments

Strobit looks like it could be a project to keep an eye on. The entire project is open source, including the hardware. The aim is to build a low cost, low power, wireless enable arduino powered widget. This seems like it could really cut down on the development time of many projects we’ve seen here. Development is still ongoing but it looks like they’ve already implemented some mesh networking similar to the zigbee systems.

[via hackaday flickr pool]