Custom Music Box Cylinder Puts A Spin On Romance

May 25, 2021 by Kristina Panos 9 Comments

Music boxes are awesome little mechanical devices. These days, they even make some with slightly more modern tunes, like the Zelda and Star Wars themes. But they don’t have everything, of course — certainly not that one song from that TV series that [RandomPrototypes]’ girlfriend absolutely adores.

But it’s 2021, and there are options for making your own music box. [RandomPrototypes] could have printed the whole thing, but those don’t sound as good with their plastic combs. Then there’s those paper punch ones, but you have to sit there and crank the thing continuously to hear the song. In the end, [RandomPrototypes] mixed methods and made a custom cylinder that’s playable with a standard music box mechanism.

[RandomPrototypes] started by taking the music box apart to measure the cylinder, and then created a software representation of a cylinder that’s designed to pluck the eighteen notes from low to high rather than play a song. Then he used a Python script to turn it in a 3D model. The slicing preview showed a lot of stops and starts and weak points, so [RandomPrototypes] generated the Gcode directly so that it would print in one continuous spiral and be much stronger.

In order to generate a cylinder with the song his girlfriend likes so much, [RandomPrototypes] printed this scale cylinder and used it to record the notes as a single mp3 and make note of the start times of each note. Finally, he built the new score based on the available notes built into the music box comb. If you want to do this yourself, the code is freely available. The hard part will be choosing a music box mechanism, because they tend to come with a single comb that’s designed to play a specific song. You’ll have to figure out which tune has most or all of the notes you need.

If you don’t mind doing the cranking to listen to the tune, then the paper-punched type of music box is going to be much easier. But why do all that punching yourself, when you could build a machine?

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Smart Guitar Will Practically Play Itself

May 23, 2021 by Kristina Panos 25 Comments

Playing the guitar is pretty difficult to do, physically speaking. It requires a lot of force with the fretting hand to produce clear notes, and that means pressing a thin piece of metal against a block of wood until the nerve endings in your fingertips die off and you grow calluses that yearn to be toughened even further. Even if you do get to this point of being broken in, it takes dexterity in both hands to actually make music. Honestly, the guitar is kind of an unwelcoming instrument, even if you don’t have any physical disabilities.

A Russian startup company called Noli Music wants to change all of that. They’re building a guitar that’s playable for everyone, regardless of physical or musical ability. Noli Music was founded by [Denis Goncharov] who has a form of muscular dystrophy. [Denis] has always wanted to rock out to his favorite songs, but struggles to play a standard guitar.

If you can touch the fretboard, it seems, you can whale away on this axe without trouble. It’s made to be easier to play all around. The strings aren’t fully tensioned, so they’re easy to pluck — the site says they only take 1.7oz of force to actuate.

Right now, the guitar is in the prototype stage. But when it’s ready to rock, it will do so a couple of ways. One uses embedded sensors in the fretboard detect finger positions and sound the appropriate note whether you pluck it or simply fret it. In another mode, the finger positions light up to help you learn new songs. The guitar will have a touchscreen interface, and Noli are planning on building a companion app to provide interactive lessons.

We have to wonder just how exactly this will be able to mimic the physics of guitar playing, especially since it’s designed with all players in mind. How satisfied will seasoned players be with this instrument? Can it do pull-offs and hammer-ons? What about slides? Do the sensors respond to bends? And most importantly, will the built-in speaker be loud enough to drown out the string vibrations? It seems to do just fine on that front, as you can see in the video below.

If the built-in speaker didn’t drown out the strings, it could make for some interesting sounds that stray outside the western chromatic scale, much like this LEGO microtonal guitar.

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Custom Macro Keyboard Looks Good In Wood

May 21, 2021 by Kristina Panos 5 Comments

There’s more than one way to make a mechanical macro pad, and this wooden wonder represents one of our favorites. [Tauno Erik] had an old rubber dome rectangle keyboard lying around that still worked, but the poor thing was missing some of its caps. After salvaging the controller, [Tauno Erik] got to work on the tedious task of figuring out the mapping of the matrix, which was made easier with a Python script.

Almost every component of this beauty is wood, including the mounting plate and those thicc and lovely keycaps — their top layer is solid oak, and the bottom bit is birch plywood. In order to interface the ‘caps with the switches, [Tauno Erik] designed and printed connector pieces that sit inside the extra large keycaps and accept the stems of the key switches.

Speaking of switches, we’re not sure if [Tauno Erik] ended up using Cherry green switches, browns, or a mix of both (that would be interesting), but each one is mounted on a custom PCB along with a diode and a pull-up resistor. You can see more build pictures at [Tauno Erik]’s site, and stick around for a visual tour of the completed build after the break.

Wood is a great choice for keycaps, and we imagine they’ll only look better with age and use. A more common use for wood on a keyboard build is in surprisingly comfortable wrist rests.

Spherical Keyboard Build Leaves Hacker Well-Rounded

May 20, 2021 by Kristina Panos 20 Comments

Often times we as hackers don’t know what we’re doing, and we sally forth and do it anyway. Here at Hackaday, we think that’s one of the best ways to go about a new project, and the absolute fastest way to learn a whole lot as you go. Just ask [Aaron Rasmussen] regarding this spherical, standing 5×6 dactyl manuform keyboard build, which you can see in a three-part short video series embedded after the break.

[Aaron] gets right down to it in the first video. He had to get creative right away, slicing up the dactyl manuform model to fit on a tiny print bed. However, there’s plenty of room inside the sphere for all that wiring and a pair of Elite-C microcontrollers running QMK. Be sure to turn on the sound to hear the accompanying voice-overs.

The second video answers our burning question: how exactly does one angle grind a slippery sphere without sacrificing sheen or shine? We love the solution, which involves swaddling the thing in duct tape and foam.

You may be wondering how [Aaron] is gonna use any kind of mouse while standing there at the pedestal keyboard. While there is space for a mouse to balance on top, this question is answered in the third video, where [Aaron] learns the truth behind the iconic ThinkPad nubbin and applies this knowledge to build a force-feedback joystick/trackpoint mouse. Awesome answer, [Aaron]!

Not ready to go full-tilt, sci-fi prop ergo? Dip your toe in the DIY waters with a handy macropad.

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PSA: Amazon Sidewalk Rolls Out June 8th

May 19, 2021 by Kristina Panos 41 Comments

Whether you own any Amazon surveillance devices or not, we know how much you value your privacy. So consider this your friendly reminder that Amazon Sidewalk is going live in a few weeks, on June 8th. A rather long list of devices have this setting enabled by default, so if you haven’t done so already, here’s how to turn it off.

Don’t know what we’re talking about? Our own Jenny List covered the topic quite concretely a few months back. The idea behind it seems innocent enough on the surface — extend notoriously spotty Wi-Fi connectivity to devices on the outer bounds of the router’s reach, using Bluetooth and LoRa to talk between devices and share bandwidth. Essentially, when Amazon flips the switch in a few weeks, their entire fleet of opt-in-by-default devices will assume a kind of Borg hive-mind in that they’ll be able to share connectivity.

A comprehensive list of Sidewalk devices includes: Ring Floodlight Cam (2019), Ring Spotlight Cam Wired (2019), Ring Spotlight Cam Mount (2019), Echo (3rd Gen), Echo (4th Gen), Echo Dot (3rd Gen), Echo Dot (4th Gen), Echo Dot (3rd Gen) for Kids, Echo Dot (4th Gen) for Kids, Echo Dot with Clock (3rd Gen), Echo Dot with Clock (4th Gen), Echo Plus (1st Gen), Echo Plus (2nd Gen), Echo Show (1st Gen), Echo Show (2nd Gen), Echo Show 5, Echo Show 8, Echo Show 10, Echo Spot, Echo Studio, Echo Input, Echo Flex. — Amazon Sidewalk FAQ

Now this isn’t a private mesh network in your castle, it’s every device in the kingdom. So don’t hesitate, don’t wait, or it will be too late. Grab all your Things and opt-out if you don’t want your doorbell cam or Alexa machine on the party line. If you have the Alexa app, you can allegedly opt out on all your devices at once.

Worried that Alexa is listening to you more often than she lets on? You’re probably right.

Tiny DeLorean Made From Lighters Is A Total Gas

May 18, 2021 by Kristina Panos 29 Comments

There’s making stuff out of trash, and then there’s mind-blowing stuff like this: a DeLorean built from four disposable cigarette lighters and various other bits and bobs like wire sheathing and cotton bud sticks. If it weren’t for the video evidence embedded below, we would have never believed that [Ank Creative] or anyone else could have turned boxy acrylic into the fastback time machine we all know and love.

Is the back window the most important detail? Maybe.

[Ank Creative] seems to have wasted no parts of the lighters, and even saved themselves a bit of trouble by using curved scraps to make the wheel wells. After installing the windshield, we certainly didn’t expect them to saw the thing in half, but how else are they going to put in the little seats and the steering column when the gull-wing doors aren’t real?

This build is all about unbelievable craftsmanship and deft but daring use of hand tools. Although this totally qualifies as an open source how-to video, you’d have to be quite the sorcerer to pull this one off. Zoom past the break (if you haven’t already) and check out this amazing build.

Disposable lighters are dirt cheap, but they get the job done and you can always see how much gas is left in the tank. On the other hand, a refillable lighter is just that, and if you build it yourself, you can make it actuate like a cap gun.

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Automated Watering Machine Has What Plants Crave: Fertilizer

May 14, 2021 by Kristina Panos 19 Comments

We’ve seen countless automated plant care systems over the years, but for some reason they almost never involve the secret sauce of gardening — fertilizer. But [xythobuz] knows what’s up. When they moved into their new flat by themselves, it was time to spread out and start growing some plants on the balcony. Before long, the garden was big enough to warrant an automated system for watering and fertilizing.

This clever DIY system is based around a 5L gravity-fed water tank with solenoid control and three [jugs] of liquid fertilizer that is added to the water via peristaltic pump. Don’t worry, the water tank has float switches, and [xythobuz] is there to switch it off manually every time so it doesn’t flood the flat.

On the UI side, an Arduino Nano clone is running the show, providing the LCD output and handling the keypad input. The machine itself is controlled with an ESP32 and a pair of four-channel relay boards that control the inlet valve, the four outlet valves, and the three peristaltic pumps that squirt out the fertilizer. The ESP also serves up a web interface that mimics the control panel and adds in the debug logs. These two boards communicate using I²C over DB-9, because that’s probably what [xythobuz] had lying around. Check out the demo video after the break, and then go check on your own plants. They miss you!

Don’t want to buy just any old peristaltic pumps? Maybe you could print your own.

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