[Jeri ellsworth] of fatmanandcircuitgirl.com has made an audio recorder out of a floppy disk and an old tape recorder. She’s able to record 15 seconds of audio directly to floppy disk. In the video after the break, she explains how it works, and why you hear the creepy reverb effect. The next step is to run this as a pedal effect for stage music, and she even mentions doing a larger hard drive version with the ability to seek tracks.
Notacon has just announced their first round of talk selections. The Cleveland, OH area hacker conference will be celebrating its sixth year April 16th-19th. When we attended this year we saw talks that ranged from circuit bending to the infamous TSA bagcam. Self-taught silicon designer [Jeri Ellsworth] presented on FPGA demoing. [Trixter] covered his demo archiving process. You can find a video archive of this year’s talks here.
We’re really looking forward to the conference. [SigFLUP] is already on the schedule to cover Sega Genesis development. Get your talk in soon though; they’re already handing out space to the knitters.
Do any of you stay awake at night agonizing over how the keytar could get even cooler? The 80s are over, so we know none of us do. Yet here we are, [James Cochrane] has gone out and turned a HP ScanJet Keytar for no apparent reason other than he thought it’d be cool. Don’t bring the 80’s back [James], the world is still recovering from the last time.
Kidding aside (except for the part of not bringing the 80s back), the keytar build is simple, but pretty cool. [James] took an Arduino, a MIDI interface, and a stepper motor driver and integrated it into some of the scanner’s original features. The travel that used to run the optics back and forth now produce the sound; the case of the scanner provides the resonance. He uses a sensor to detect when he’s at the end of the scanner’s travel and it instantly reverses to avoid collision.
A off-the-shelf MIDI keyboard acts as the input for the instrument. As you can hear in the video after the break; it’s not the worst sounding instrument in this age of digital music. As a bonus, he has an additional tutorial on making any stepper motor a MIDI device at the end of the video.
If you don’t have an HP ScanJet lying around, but you are up to your ears in surplus Commodore 64s, we’ve got another build you should check out.
The Nyan Cat you see above is only 600 micrometers from head to tail. To put that into perspective, that’s about 10 times the diameter of a human hair. Also, that Nyan is etched into 200 nanometer thick copper foil and is the work of the HomeCMOS team, who is developing a hobbyist-friendly process to make integrated circuits and MEMS devices at home.
The project is far from complete; HomeCMOS has yet to produce a working IC but a few experiments – getting wet etching down pat and even building an almost working quantum qbit – are remarkable given the small amount of equipment and tools involved.
The HomeCMOS team has yet to actually make an integrated circuit or MEMS device, [Jeri Ellsworth] has shown this is possible by making transistors and integrated circuits at home. While there won’t be chips with millions of transistors coming out of the HomeCMOS lab anytime soon, it’s more than possible to see a few small-scale integration-level tech such as a few logic gates or a regulator.
It’s been nearly two months since the official entry portion of the 555 timer contest came to a close, and the judges have been busy poring over the 200+ entries since. Now that the votes have been tallied, it’s just about time for the official results to be announced.
The results will be live streamed this evening at 9pm Eastern, and you can watch the results here on uStream or here, with an embedded IRC chat. There will be four main awards given out this evening, highlighting the most complex, most minimalistic, most artistic, and most useful 555 creations. There are also “Best in Show” and “Best Under 18” awards up for grabs, the winners of which were selected by celebrity judges Forrest Mims and Hans Camenzind.
The show will definitely be worth checking out – we’ll be there at 9pm sharp, see you there!
If you want to take a look at some of the 555 Contest entries we featured throughout February, check these out:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPclj5lbz48]
In this video from Maker Faire, [Jon Beck] of CLUE — the Columbia Laboratory for Unconventional Electronics — demonstrates the unexpected ease of creating custom electroluminescent (EL) displays using materials from DuPont and common t-shirt screen printing tools. Eagle-eyed reader [ithon] recognized the Hack a Day logo among the custom shapes, which escaped our notice at the time. Sorry, Jon! Very cool project, even if the setup is a bit steep. You’ll find links to materials at the project site.
If the interviewer seems especially sharp, that’s because it’s none other than [Jeri “Circuit Girl” Ellsworth], who makes transistors from scratch and designed the C64 DTV. We’re not worthy!
