[Hounjini] was poking around at the Game Boy Advanced bus of his Nintendo DS lite and figured out how to use it to connect an Arduino to the DS. For testing he’s soldered an IDC plug to the cartridge cover pin interface but this only requires four connections. The Arduino can both send and receive data from the DS lite as shown in the example videos after the break. The data access is made possible by making the Arduino look like a controller that the DS is happy to talk to.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azfgasnWtW0]
[Robert] wrote a program using Max/MSP that lets him make music with his guitar hero controller. There’s another video after the break where he walks through the various features but here’s the gist of it. This works on Mac and Windows and allows a sort of ‘live play’ or midi mapping mode. In the midi mode each key can be configured to do your bidding. His example uses the pick bar to scroll through different samples and the green button the play them or the red button to stop.
The live mode us much more involved. In the software you choose the type of scale and the key you’d like to play in. This makes up for the controller’s lack of enough frets to make it a chromatic instrument and these settings can be adjust from the controller. There is an up-pick offset that makes the upward movement of the pick bar a different note than the downward movement. The motion control can also be used as an input. He demonstrates pitch bending and cutoff using that method.
This looks like a lot of fun. He needs to team up with [Joran] to add drums to the mix, forming a much more creative rock band than you can buy in the store.
Continue reading “Guitar Hero As An Instrument Or Midi Controller”
In need of a portable power supply, [Alastair] threw some batteries into an Altoids tin. The problem was he didn’t have a holder for these size A23 cells. Inspiration struck and he realized the blister pack they came in fits them snuggly and just needs some conductors to complete the circuit. He pulled some battery contacts from a broken CD player. Using foam-based double-stick tape he added some spring to the contacts and came up with a perfectly sized holder that works wonderfully.
We’ve tried making battery packs by wrapping the entire thing in clods of duct tape. This looks like it works a lot better and there’s still room to fit the batteries and a switch inside of this minty enclosure.
[Mpark’s] propeller controlled Etch-a-Sketch is well built and very accurate. He was inspired by the Step-a-Sketch project and he’s carried that design through to a stunning conclusion. The driver board was built around a Parallax Propeller P8X32A microcontroller. But this isn’t just a serial controller board for connecting the hardware to a PC running CNC software. He’s included TV out and a keyboard port so that programming can be done on the chip itself.
In the video after the break you can see how precise the plotting is on the Etch-a-Sketch. It is well mounted but also benefits from some software compensation for the toy’s imprecise controls. [Mpark] has also included an erase function that tilts the frame upside-down a few times. This is used not only to erase a drawing but to hide the line created when moving the stylus into its starting position.
Continue reading “Propeller Takes Step-a-Sketch To A New Level”
A diode allows current to travel in only one direction. With that in mind, [Alex] built a mechanical diode that will only allow gear rotation in one direction to be transmitted through the system. But wait, by connecting two of these devices together he’s built something of a mechanical rectifier. An electrical rectifier converts alternating current to direct current and this mechanical version outputs clockwise rotation no matter what direction of rotation is coming into the device.
There’s video which we’ve embedded after the break as well as many pictures on his site but not much explanation. Here’s what we’ve deduced. The two large gears are inputs. Mounted on top of them is a smaller ratcheting gear that will only turn in one direction. This ratcheting gear selects whether the smallest gear on the left or right will rotate, which then feeds the output gear at the top of this image. Continue reading “The Mechanical Diode”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJ7gD0nH-xA]
If you think there’s never enough computerized numerical control in your life perhaps the pizza plotter should be your next project. This is a large 2-axis machine that shoots pressurized sauce onto a pizza crust. It’s a food-grade RepStrap and appears to use a garden sprayer as a reservoir. They learned their lesson when a loose hose clamp sprayed sauce around the room. We’re thinking this is a bit of reinventing the wheel as pizza-making factories but it’s fun nonetheless.
[MkMan’s] LEGO spider robot combines pieces from a Mindstorm kit with a few milled plastic parts. The legs are a locomotive concept called a Klann Linkage. They operate in pairs and convert the rotational force from one motor into movement for two legs. Here, a total of four rotating gears moves eight legs, besting the hexapods we saw a couple of weeks ago in both leg count and motor economy.
Each limb is made up of five pieces plus one base for each pair. That makes eleven pieces per pair and a total of 44 for the entire robot. [MkMan] milled these parts out of 3/8″ HDPE stock. He’s made videos of forward motion and turning which we’ve embedded after the break. Even on a polished surface the bot looks fairly efficient at getting around.
