Cable Management For Pull-out Shelves

November 23, 2009 by Mike Szczys 25 Comments

Cable management is a headache for all, and if unmitigated it becomes a playground for cats. [kws103] posted a project a while ago that takes care of the messy wires for electronics on pull out shelving. Channel bracket is used to house the cables and has been articulated in three places to facilitate the movement of the sliding shelf. For an added touch an outlet was built into the surface to make it easy to unplug and remove the components if necessary. The hinges for articulation use aluminum base plates and rely on rivets as a pivot point, something that might need improvement if pulling the shelf in and out is a common occurence. Add this to the Ikea based solution we looked at in August and your days of electronic rats nests may be coming to an end.

Electronic Guitar Pick Tunes The Strings For You

November 23, 2009 by Mike Szczys 25 Comments

The Stimmmopped is an electronic guitar tuner made to be used as a guitar pick. This uses two LEDs synchronized to blink at the exact frequency of the string you are tuning. Pluck the string with the corner of the PCB and then shine the light on the string you are tuning. As the vibrating string moves back and forth it will only pick up the spot of light when the frequency matches that of the blinking LED. Once in tune, both red lights will appear to be constantly illuminated and immobile on the string.

An Atmel ATmega8 is used to control the device, interfacing with two buttons and a seven-segment display to choose the pitch currently being tuned. Gibson has a robotic guitar that features an auto-tuning mode, but if you don’t want to shell that much this low cost and simple build is for you.

[Thanks Sören]

CNC Circuit Board Fabrication

November 23, 2009 by Mike Szczys 35 Comments

[Jonathan Ward’s] pcb mill is as impressive as it is inexpensive. Twenty-six plywood parts, labeled A-Z, are used to assemble the machine along with the customary precision rods, stepper motors, and router assembly. His bill of materials prices the unit at $458.18, a small price to pay in order to forgo a multi-step etching process.

His test board shows some fairly fine pitch that could turn out most home-project circuit boards. We’ve contacted [Jonathan] regarding the specifics of milling the plywood parts out of a 2 foot by 4 foot sheet of plywood. Watch for an update with any information he’s willing to share. We hope he’ll make the milling files for the plywood parts available so that you can build a copy of the device for your own use.

[Thanks Charles]

Building Capacitive Sensitive Floor Tiles

November 22, 2009 by Mike Szczys 38 Comments

That title’s a mouthful but you’re already familiar with the technology and application of foot pads as sensors in games like Dance Dance Revolution. The usbddr project sought to make a USB connected DDR controller from scratch. The microcontroller used is an Atmel ATmega8 running the V-USB firmware for connectivity and uses the analog to digital converts to read in data from the capacitive sensors.

The physical implementation is cleaver. The base plate has a capacitor plate attached to the top of it and the tile has the other capacitor plate attached to the bottom of it. The two are separated by some weather-stripping which is spongy enough to allow compression, bringing the two capacitor plates together.

We’re not convinced of the long-term durability of the system. We certainly don’t think it will hold up to very much hard-core DDR playing. But we would love to see a Super Mario RPG style puzzle to unlock the door to the ‘castle’ at a child’s birthday party.

[Thanks Hans]

Build A Camera Boom At Less Than A Grand

November 21, 2009 by Mike Szczys 25 Comments

The folks at The Geek Group built a camera crane for less than $1000. In the video embedded after the break a presenter takes you through the different parts that make up the boom and how it is operated. This feels like something from a Junkyard Wars challenge as most of the parts are scavenged or from an industrial surplus store. Don’t let that sour your opinion, what they’ve ended up with is amazingly functional.

The base of the unit is a rolling tripod used for television cameras from around the 1960’s. The aluminum boom attaches to the base with a few large bearings and features a fine tuning balance system. The camera mount is motorized and can be moved using a joystick or set to scan automatically. It’s nice to see more examples of custom camera mounts. Obviously this isn’t a build for everyone, but as cameras and camera equipment become more readily available it makes high quality video production available for the masses, not just the networks.

Continue reading “Build A Camera Boom At Less Than A Grand” →

Multixylophoniomnibus

November 20, 2009 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

[Ania] wrote in to let us know her team had finished the Multixylophoniomnibus and that they have posted an extensive writeup about it. We covered this augmented xylophone when it was still in development at the beginning of this month. Originally they wanted to use mallets wrapped in tinfoil as switches that close when they contact the metal keys, something akin to matchbox cars as a switch. This plan was thwarted when they realized the paint surface insulated the metal keys. At this point they switched to piezo sensors which turned into an odyssey of trial and error to achieve a reliable input for the Arduino to monitor. In the end they got it working with around forty lines of code, interfacing six boxes containing a different type of noisemaker.

See the finished instrument played in the video after the break. Alas, the addition of the piezo sensors do impede the resonance of the xylophone keys, but we still like it! There’s something reminiscent of the beginning of Pink Floyd’s Money when this is played.

Continue reading “Multixylophoniomnibus” →

Tube Prototyping Station

November 20, 2009 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

[Gio] enjoys using vacuum tubes in his projects. He designs the circuits using a CAD program but was finding that there is no substitute for actually building a prototype before heading to a final design. To make this process easier, he built his own tube prototyping station.

At the top of the board he’s got three different sizes of tube sockets with the pins from each wired as common. The nine pins from the sockets break out to a terminal strip where they can be interfaced with a solderless breadboard. For added versatility he’s included terminals to tap into some RCA jacks, as well as a 100 kOhm variable resistor. We’d bet this is not something that you can find ready-made, but it sure does look a whole lot better than a workbench full of components alligator-clipped together.