Author: Kristina Panos

1857 Articles

Spooky Noise Box Plays War Drums

September 20, 2023 by 6 Comments

What do you have cooked up to scare trick-or-treaters this Halloween? We humbly suggest adding in some type of noise box, especially one like this offering from [Paisley Computer] that uses reverb and other effects to achieve chilling, thrilling sounds.

As you can see, this instrument is essentially a bunch of doodads affixed to and through a cigar box. And as you’ll hear in the first video after the break, the various rubber bands make great drum sounds. The springs are nice, too, but our personal favorite has to be the head massager thing. Shhhing!

Inside the box you’ll find a guitar jack and some piezos glued to the underside of the top surface, but you’ll also find springs mounted across the inside that add to the resonance of the cigar box.

You can use either an interface and DAW or an effects pedal chain to really make things freaky, and [Paisley Computer] does a showdown between Focusrite interface versus various stomp pedals in the second video. In the third video, we learn how to make one of our own.

Do you like the idea of a spring reverb? How about a really big one that sounds sort of Satanic?

Continue reading “Spooky Noise Box Plays War Drums” →

You’ve Got Mail: Reading Addresses With OCR

September 20, 2023 by 14 Comments

Last time I delivered on this column, I told you about the USPS’ attempts to fully automate a post office. Of course, that’s a bit of a misnomer, since it took 1,500 employees to actually operate the place on a daily basis. Although Project Turnkey in Rhode Island and Project Gateway in California were proving grounds for all kinds of mail sorting and processing equipment, the act of actually reading addresses and routing mail to its final destination still required human intervention and hand coding.

Today, the post office processes hundreds of millions of mail pieces each day using various pieces of equipment. One of those important pieces of equipment is the OCR address reader, which manages to make sense of all kinds of chicken scratch.

Continue reading “You’ve Got Mail: Reading Addresses With OCR” →

Time And Tide Are One Thing

September 19, 2023 by 3 Comments

The rise of 3D printing has given us incredible things, from awesome tchotchkes to intricate chocolates to useful things like spare body parts. But none has been so vital to comedy as say, printing hats for sea urchins. That’s right, sea urchins like to cover up with various things and will happily don, say, a 3D printed hat if presented the opportunity.

So anyway, this is a tide clock that uses a printed sea urchin and various hats to tell the time until/between low and high tide. How? It uses the position of a given hat relative to a couple nOOds LED strands, one for high tide and another for low.

Inside the large bamboo enclosure is an TTGO that fetches cheaply-obtained tide information and displays it on the screen. The TTGO also controls a servo that moves the sea urchin around. As it moves, a magnet in the urchin’s head (?) attracts the next hat.

Before settling on the current design, [rabbitcreek] experimented with both a sand dollar and a sea urchin skeleton. All the files are available if you want to whip up your own.

This isn’t [rabbitcreek]’s first foray into tide clocks. Here’s a solar number that should last for years.

What Is Killing Cursive? Ballpoints. Probably.

September 18, 2023 by 225 Comments

I get it — you hate writing by hand. But have you ever considered why that is? Is it because typing is easier, faster, and more convenient here in 2023? Maybe so. All of those notwithstanding, I honestly think there’s an older reason: it’s because of the rise of ballpoint pens. And I’m not alone.

Bear with me here. Maybe you think you hate writing because you were forced to do it in school. While that may very well be, depending on your age, you probably used a regular wood-case pencil before graduating to the ballpoint pen, never experiencing the joys of the fountain pen. Well, it’s never too late.

Continue reading “What Is Killing Cursive? Ballpoints. Probably.” →

Kinetic Sculpture Intermittently Lights Up The Night

September 16, 2023 by 4 Comments

We absolutely love the impetus of this project, as it definitely sounds like something a Hackaday reader would go through. After finally deciding between a CNC router and a laser cutter, [Eirik Brandal] was planning to “Hello, World” the CNC with something quick and simple, like maybe a few acrylic plates with curves and some electronics. Instead, feature creep took over, “things escalated out of control”, and [Eirik] came up with this intriguing and complicated kinetic sculpture.

As you’ll see in the demo video below, this is a motor-driven sculpture with sound and intermittent light. It has an Arduino Nano Every, two motors, and eight gears with various cog counts to accommodate the project. The light comes from LEDs that are attached to the DIY gears with their legs bent and their little feet sliding around homemade slip rings in order to alight.

But what about the sound? There’s an affixed piezo disk that picks up the gears’ vibrations and chafing, and this gets amplified to augment the acoustic sounds of the sculpture. Be sure to check out the quite satisfying demo video after the break, and stick around for the build video.

Are you as fascinated by kinetic sculptures as we are? Here’s on that uses machine learning in order to bring balance to itself.

Continue reading “Kinetic Sculpture Intermittently Lights Up The Night” →

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

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Death Metal Macro Pad

September 14, 2023 by 7 Comments

At “the size of three 60% keyboards (put together)” or approximately one Cannibal Corpse record on vinyl, this beautifully-executed death metal font-inspired macro pad by [zyumbik] may be better off hanging on the wall than hanging out on the desktop.

But let’s say you did have room for the 9-key Deathpad on your desktop. Wouldn’t you just play with the tentacles (?) all the time like I would? Yeah, that’s what I thought. They’re pretty inviting.

So why does this look so fantastic? It’s an SLA print, for one thing. For another, [zyumbik] spent over 1,000 hours designing the thing. Unfortunately it’s not open-source, but you can buy the only other one in existence for a cool $1,000.

Rubik’s Cube Keyboard

Although it doesn’t rotate (yet), creator [_Rudeism] is calling this the Rubik’s Cube Keyboard. Fine with me, though any type of actual rotation would be insanely difficult to pull off. The plan is to do it with RGB LEDs.

The layout is QWERTY-adjacent — the white side is the num pad, yellow has the modifiers, and the other four sides house all the letters. As you might imagine, this uses a custom frame and PCBs. The switches are Glorious Gateron Clears, which definitely supports the blinkenlights planned for V2.

This thing reminds me a bit of of the SafeType™ vertical keyboard, or even [Aaron Rasmussen]’s spherical keyboard. Be sure to check it out in Monkeytype action, where [_Rudeism] manages to pull off about 20WPM. Continue reading “Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Death Metal Macro Pad” →