Lo-Fi Fun: Beer Can Microphones

December 27, 2022 by Kristina Panos 16 Comments

Sometimes, you just need an easy win, right? This is one of those projects. A couple months back, I was looking at my guitars and guitar accessories and thought, it is finally time to do something with the neck I’ve had lying around for years. In trying to decide a suitable body for the slapdash guitar I was about to build, I found myself at a tractor supply store for LEGO-related reasons. (Where else are you going to get a bunch of egg cartons without eating a bunch of eggs?) I noticed that they happened to also stock ammo boxes. Bam! It’s sturdy, it opens easily, and it’s (very) roughly guitar body shaped. I happily picked one up and started scheming on the way home.

Having never built a cigar box guitar before and being of a certain vintage, I’m inclined to turn to books instead of the Internet, so I stocked up from the library. Among my early choices was Making Poor Man’s Guitars by Shane Speal, who is widely considered to be the guru on the subject. In flipping through the book, I noticed the beer can microphone project and was immediately taken by the aesthetic of some cool old 70s beer can with a 1/4″ instrument jack on the bottom, just asking for some dirty blues to be belted into it. I had to build one. Or twelve.

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Morphing Keyboard Gets You Dialed In Just Right

December 21, 2022 by Kristina Panos 5 Comments

So you’re tired of rectangular, brick wall-staggered keyboards and want to go split and/or ergo. But how? Which style? What do? Here’s what you do: you build one of these here LHM Morph boards and customize the crap out of it, because that’s what it’s for.

So what is this thing, anyway? Is it a even a keyboard? Well, as long as you can press switches and send key commands to a computer, it certainly smells like a keyboard to us. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, what’s going on here is that [LifeHackerMax] has built a highly-customizable version of the LHM, their 26-key split. The LHM Morph can be fine-tuned to nearly any degree imaginable, including the tenting angle. The keys are grouped in modules that can slide back and forth to suit your varying finger lengths. As they are half-round, these modules can also be tilted and rotated until they’re just right.

But the super cool thing about the LHM Morph is the way it goes together — like LEGO. It’s completely modular, and you don’t even have to go split if you’re not ready for that. But all the pieces connect via rods made of copper wire. If you’d like to make one for yourself, the 3D files are up on Thingiverse, and the firmware is on GitHub. Be sure to check out the video after the break.

Does this keyboard remind you of anything? [Peter Lyons]’ Squeezebox, perhaps?

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DIY Square Guitar Is Anything But

December 17, 2022 by Kristina Panos 3 Comments

One of the greatest things about this place is how y’all constantly feed off of each other. And while this isn’t exactly an example of that, it’s pretty darn close — we feature a square guitar build one day, and get a tip about another way different and perhaps more functional one the next.

[Craig Lindley] had no idea of his luthier powers until an email from StewMac inspired him to build his own guitar. Rather than strip a perfectly good axe or two for all the parts, he bought the hardware and a pre-made neck, and built the body himself. The Bo Diddley-inspired boxy body is an ice cream sandwich of sapele, inlaid with white ash around the perimeter which is quite the classy look. Speaking of looks, [Craig] worried that all-gold hardware would be too flashy, but we think it looks great.

Not hard-mode enough for you? Well, here’s a guitar made from scratch, (more or less). If you’d rather have more of a teaching guitar, behold this LED-laden axe.

Hackaday Podcast 197: Decoding VHS, Engineering The TV Guardian, And Gitting Code Into Your ESP32s

December 16, 2022 by Kristina Panos No comments

This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos delighted in the aural qualities of Kristina’s brand new, real (read: XLR) microphone before embarking on creating a podcast highlighting the best of the previous week’s hacks.

This week in the news, NASA returned to the Moon with Artemis I, and this time, there are CubeSats involved. After that, it’s on to the What’s That Sound results show, marred by Kristina’s cheating scandal (listening ahead of time) and Elliot’s reading the filename aloud before we started recording. Finally, we move on to the hacks — they start with a trip to the 90s both sonically and visually, and end with a really nice alarm clock that’s decidedly 70s, and definitely Hackaday.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

And/or download it and listen offline.

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There’s Nothing Square About This Rectangular Guitar

December 9, 2022 by Kristina Panos 16 Comments

We kind of already knew this, but it seems that [Uri Tuchman] really can build absolutely anything. This fall, he was asked to compete in the Great Guitar Build-Off competition, which involves a fully-customizable kit guitar sent to each entrant as a starting point. In order to allow for maximum creativity, the wooden parts like the body and the headstock are square. And quite creatively, [Uri] kept them that way. Square, that is.

While yes, the body rising out of the squareness is in fact a Les Paul profile, there are a ton of details that make this a [Uri Tuchman] instead. For starters, everything is square, beginning with the custom brass knobs for the volume and tone potentiometers. We’re not sure if it came with humbuckers, but that sure is a happy accident if so. If only the neck blank had been square, [Uri] could have made a lap steel. Once it was finished, [Uri] took it to a luthier to have it set up, fine-tuned, and assessed for quality. Of course, it passed with flying Vs colors.

There are plenty of other [Uri] hallmarks, like the bird on the neck plate, and another hiding in the hand-drawn and hand-carved pickguard, so be sure to check it out after the break.

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Osprey Keyboard Lets The NRF52840 Spread Its Wings

December 8, 2022 by Kristina Panos 14 Comments

While most people don’t care whether they use one finger or ten, some people want to better themselves by learning how to touch-type. And honestly, there’s no easier way to do that than by getting into the ergo keyboard game. Even if you consider yourself a touch-typist already, an ortholinear or column-staggered keyboard may teach you otherwise, as you find yourself trying to type ‘c’ with your index finger (for example) and failing miserably.

[ebastler] chose the best of all routes and decided to build his own perfect keyboard, called the Osprey. It’s a wireless, column-staggered 40% that runs on ZMK firmware, which of course is open-source, as is the PCB itself and the thick and travel-ready printed enclosure. Although [ebastler] has yet to implement either one of these additional inputs, the Osprey also supports a thumbstick and a track pad.

Brain-wise, it’s a bare nRF52840 chip along with a TI BQ24075 for battery charging. The interesting thing about this implementation is that [ebastler] used and abused Nordic sample schematic #4, which utilizes both DC-DC converter stages of the chip. We can’t wait to see what this trailblazing build will mean for the community!

Singapore Branches Out Into Internet Of Trees

December 8, 2022 by Kristina Panos 18 Comments

Five years ago, a 38-year-old woman was enjoying an outdoor concert with her family with one of her twin infants in her arms. In the week prior, it had been windy and rainy, but today, the weather was nice, and the concert was crowded. Without warning, a 270-year-old tembusu tree fell on the woman, pinning and ultimately killing her after the other concertgoers couldn’t remove it in time. This tragedy happened in spite of twice-yearly inspections where the tree showed no visual signs of trouble.

It’s exactly this type of incident that Singaporean officials hope to avoid by building an Internet of Trees. The equatorial island nation is home to roughly 5.5 million people, and around 7 million trees — about 6 million of which are tracked by Singapore’s National Parks Board, so that they can be managed remotely with an app. (The Board only tracks trees once they’ve reached a certain size, so we’ll assume that the other million are too young to join the fun just yet.)

While tree-triggered deaths are fairly few and far between, there are plenty of other ‘tree incidents’ that can occur, such as a branch falling, or a tree trunk snapping or uprooting. Depending on the size of the branch, this can be a dangerous nuisance as it could block roads, obscure signage, or destroy property. Thanks to the efforts of the National Parks Board, these incidents have dropped from around 3,000 per year at the turn of the millennium to under 500 per year today.

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