A custom LEGO throne for Dune's Baron Harkonnen.

A Throne For LEGO Baron Harkonnen

If you’re both a LEGO and a Dune fan, unless you’ve been living in a cave on Mars with your eyes shut and fingers in your ears, you’re probably aware that LEGO released a set for the royal Atreides ornithopter. The blades flap and everything. Anyway, it comes with several minifigures, including one that doesn’t quite fit with the others — a full-length Baron Harkonnen.

The inner workings of the Baron throne, showing the Baron affixed to his stepper motor. Given that, [gorkyver] decided to create a throne for the Baron that he could rise from, just like in the movie, while delivering the iconic line. With no reference materials available other than pausing the movie, [gorkyver] created a throne from scratch in BrickLink Studio, which made it easy to generate both a parts list and step-by-step instructions.

At the heart of this build is an Arduino Nano, which takes input from the momentary push button and starts the show. The Baron slowly rises on a rack and spur gear connected to a stepper motor, and a DF Player Mini runs the audio through a 75 mm speaker.

Rather than just buying a big box store display case off of eBay, [gorkyver] recreated the skeleton in Fusion 360 and used a hairdryer to bend a sheet of PET-G around to enclose it. A couple of sweet adhesive graphics later, and it totally looks like a real set on display. Don’t miss the demo/build video after the break.

Did you hear? The European Space Agency printed some bricks out of meteorite dust, and there might be one on display near you.

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A tuna fish with several probes sticking out of it.

So You Can Tuna Fish

You know what they say. But it’s 2024, after all. Shouldn’t you be able to tune a fish by now? As [ChromaLock] shows us in the video below, it’s absolutely possible, and has been all along.

Of course, you can’t possibly put a rainbow trout (or any other fish) under tension until it produces audible tones. So, how does it work? [ChromaLock] turned to the skin, which functions electrically much like ours does with different resistance values in different areas.

A cucumber with a dozen or so probes sticking out of it, lined up in a 3D-printed jig.From there, it was a matter of hunting around for spots that produced different notes that sounded good, and marking them for later so it can be played like a potentiometer. But there were problems with this setup, mostly screeching between notes from stray voltages in the environment.

After a brief detour using a PS/2 keyboard with spray-painted keycaps, [ChromaLock] said to hell with it and unearthed a regular MIDI keyboard. Armed with a 3D printed jig to hold the probes, [ChromaLock] tested everything with a cucumber, and then out came the trout for its musical debut. Be sure to check it out after the break.

What else can you do with canned tuna and other fish? Cook up some pyrolized bread, and you’ve got yourself a foundry and crucible.

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A Lenovo Yoga with a mechanical keyboard, held up by its creator.

Mechanical Keyboard + Laptop = Clacktop

What do you do when your laptop keyboard breaks for the second time? Well, most people might use an external keyboard until they couldn’t take it anymore and bought a new machine. But [Marcin Plaza] isn’t most people.

It took more than twelve hours of CAD, but [Marcin] redesigned the case to be at least twice as thick as the Lenovo Yoga that inspired this project in order to accommodate a slimmed-down mechanical keyboard. Further weight-loss surgery was required in order to make the keyboard fit, but the end result is kind of a marvel of engineering. It’s marriage of sleek modernity and early laptop chonky-ness, and we love it.

Lacking a complete metal fab shop of one’s own, [Marcin] elected to have a board house fab it out of titanium and was quite surprised by the result. We really like the clear acrylic bottom, into which [Marcin] drilled many holes for airflow. Be sure to check out the build and demo video after the break.

Did you initially wonder whether the new case was printed? That’s totally a thing, too.

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Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The 24-Hour Macro Pad

They say Rome wasn’t built in a day, but this great little music-controlling macro pad by [nibbler] actually was. Why? Because as Hackaday’s own [Donald Papp] reminded us, we all need a win sometimes, especially as projects drag on and on without any end in sight.

A small macro pad with six buttons.
Image by [nibbler] via Toxic Antidote
As [nibbler] points out, what really constitutes a win? Set the bar too low and it won’t feel like one at all. Too high, and you may become too discouraged to cross the finish line. With that in mind, [nibbler] set the bar differently, limiting themselves to what could be done in the one day per week they have to devote time to electronic matters.

One-day turnaround usually means using parts on hand and limiting oneself to already-learned skills and techniques. No problem for [nibbler], who, armed with an Arduino Leonardo Tiny and a some colorful push buttons, set about designing a suitable enclosure, and then putting it all together. Was this a win? [nibbler] says yes, and so do I.

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A batarang-shaped keyboard with a Batmobile that we wish was a mouse.

Holy Keyboard Case, Batman!

Whoever thought a keyboard could look so sinister? Well, [rain2] aka [AffectionateWin7178], that’s who. Vengeance is the sixth keyboard they’ve designed, and let’s just say we wouldn’t mind seeing the other five.

This is a takeoff of Zazu, a custom case printed for the monoblock split designed by [AlSaMoMo]. A friend of [rain2] made a ZMK PCB for the Zazu about a month ago, and they dreamed up the case design together. Among our first questions were of course, how do you type without those bat wings digging into your palms? But evidently, they are designed not to get in the way at all during use.

We particularly like the gold skirt around the edge which joins the two printed halves. It goes nicely with the bank vault elements like the dial around the trackball and the five-way switch that resembles a handle. And yeah, we wish the Batmobile was a mouse, too. While it seems that [rain2] hasn’t released the STLs for the case, you can find the ZMK Zazu repo on GitHub. Happy designing! As always, let us know what you come up with.

Here’s another BAT keyboard you might be interested in.

A business card-sized synthesizer with capacitive touch pads.

2024 Business Card Challenge: The Gift Of Music

Has anyone ever told you that you just can’t carry a tune? If you were to be the lucky recipient of one of [Ayu]’s synthesizer business cards, well, then it really couldn’t be helped.

This tiny, go-anywhere instrument has quite a lot going for it. It’s easy for anyone to pick up and play something, but versatile enough that a more experienced musician can add complexity. While we do tend to see twelve keys in a small form-factor like this, the Canta-Cart uses them a bit differently. Only ten are tied to notes, and the other two are for transposition.

[Ayu] was able to keep the BOM cost way down by using the PY32, which is an ARM Cortex-M microcontroller made by Puya that costs as little as 10¢ each. In fact, the whole BOM clocks in around 60¢ total even with the audio DAC and amplifier ICs, which really makes these ideal to actually give away to people. Check it out in action after the break, or try it in the browser!

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Exploded view of a mini PC built into a keyboard.

Keyboard Contains Entire Mini PC, Just BYOD

When we talk about keyboards that do it all, we usually mean either big ones with lots of keys and doodads like rotary encoders and displays, or small ones with lots of layers (and usually a few doodads, too). But this — this is something else entirely. Chinese PC maker Linglong have crammed an entire mini PC into a keyboard that’s small enough to fit in your back pocket. Oh, and it folds, too. All you need is a display.

Why do you need a display? Why not include one, if you’re going to wedge everything else in there? Well, the company envisions its users pairing it with a VR or AR glasses. But we can see use cases far beyond ownership of special spectacles, of course.

For instance, office work. Linglong says this key-puter (you read it here first) will last up to ten hours for light use, and nearly six hours for watching movies, but heavy use will have you down to four hours, which really isn’t that bad.

Spec-wise, it looks pretty good, with an AMD Ryzen 7 and either 16 or 32 GB of memory and a half- or full-terabyte hard drive. The whole thing is around 4 x 6″ (15 x 10cm), presumably in the folded orientation, and weighs less than two pounds (800 g). The projected cost is $400-500 depending on specs.

Unfortunately, this little key-puter isn’t available just yet. There are just 200 units available for Beta testing, and no, we don’t have one!

Main and thumbnail images via Linglong