InstaBeat Started Out Of Spite

November 24, 2019 by 27 Comments

[Tom] teaches electronics with this small programmable MP3 player, but it didn’t get its start as a teaching tool.

As all parents are sometimes required to do, [Tom] was acting as chauffeur for his daughter and his friends. When he played the Beatles one of his passengers informed him that she was completely devoid of taste and didn’t like them at all. So he decided what the world needed was a Beatles appliance. This way all the ignorant plebs could educate themselves at the push of a button.

The machine is based around some SEED studio parts and a simple PCB. It was able to hold all 12 original albums and even announced their titles in a generated voice. Since the kit is easy to put together it was quickly re-purposed as a teaching aid. They get to learn the laser cutter and do some through-hole soldering.

He has plans to turn it into a more formal how-to workshop that anyone can duplicate.He’d also like to make a small software suite for playing with text-to-speech and hacking the speaker into other roles such as a multi meter.

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Thea Flowers – Creating A Sega-Inspired Hardware Synthesizer From The Ground Up

November 22, 2019 by 5 Comments

For those who grew up with video games, the legendary sounds of consoles past are an instant nostalgia hit. [Thea Flowers] first got her hands on a gamepad playing Sonic the Hedgehog, so the sounds of the Sega Genesis hold a special place in her heart. Decades later, this inspired the creation of Genesynth, a hardware synth inspired by the classic console. The journey of developing this hardware formed the basis of [Thea]’s enlightening Supercon talk.

[Thea’s] first begins by exploring why the Genesis sound is so unique. The Sega console slotted neatly into a time period where the company sought to do something more than simple subtractive synthesis, but before it was possible to use full-waveform audio at an affordable price point. In collaboration with Yamaha, the YM2612 FM synthesis chip was built, a cost-reduced sound engine similar to that in the famous DX7 synthesizer of the 1980s. This gave the Genesis abilities far beyond the basic bleeps and bloops of other consoles at the time, and [Thea] decided it simply had to be built into a dedicated hardware synth.

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Printed Arduino Turntable Takes Objects For A Spin

November 12, 2019 by 5 Comments

Have you built a 3D scanner yet? There’s more than one way to model those curves and planes, but the easiest may be photogrammetry — that’s the one where you take a bunch of pictures and stitch them into a 3D model. If you build a scanner like [Brian Brocken]’s that does almost everything automatically, you might consider starting a scan-and-print side hustle.

This little machine spins objects 360° and triggers a Bluetooth remote tethered to an iPhone. In automatic mode, it capture anywhere from 2-200 pictures. There’s a mode for cinematic shots that shoots video of the object slowly spinning around, which makes anything look at least 35% more awesome. A third mode offers manual control of the turntable’s position and speed.

An Arduino UNO controls a stepper that moves the turntable via 3D printed-in-place bearing assembly. This project is a (vast) improvement over [Brian]’s hand-cranked version that we looked at over the summer, though both are works of art in their own right.

Our favorite part aside from the bearing is the picture-taking process itself. [Brian] couldn’t get the iPhone to play nice with HC-05 or -06 modules, so he’s got the horn of 9g servo tapping the shutter button on a Bluetooth remote. This beautiful beast is wide open, so fire up that printer. You can watch the design and build process of the turntable after the break.

Want to scan some really tiny things? Make a motorized microscope from movie machines.

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The Murky Business Of Stopping Oil Spills

November 5, 2019 by 35 Comments

Six years before Deepwater Horizon exploded in April 2010, the force of Hurricane Ivan blew an offshore drilling platform off its legs and into the Gulf of Mexico. For the last 14 years, that well’s pipes, long buried in mud and debris have been spilling oil into the Gulf every single day. That makes it the longest-running spill in history. Every day for fourteen years. Let that sink in for a bit.

Taylor Energy’s platform sat just 10 miles off the coast, much closer to the Louisiana shore than Deepwater Horizon was. Since the hurricane hit, Taylor has tried a number of unsuccessful things to stop the spill. They’ve only been able to plug 9 of the 25 broken pipes so far. The rest are buried deep in mud and debris. Why on Earth haven’t you heard about this before? Taylor spent six years covering it up. And they might have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for pesky watchdog groups surveying the Gulf after Deepwater Horizon exploded.

So how are oil spills stopped, anyway? The answer depends on many things. Most immediately, the answer depends whether the spill happened onshore or offshore, and the inciting incident that caused the spill. Underwater oil spills are much more difficult to stop because of the weight and existence of the ocean. In Taylor Energy’s case, the muddy Gulf bed has become a murky tomb for the broken and buried pipes, which makes it even more messy.

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Rise And Shine With This Japanese-Inspired Clock

November 3, 2019 by 4 Comments

On the Hackaday.io page for his gorgeous “Sunrise Alarm Clock”, [The Big One] is quick to point out that his design is only inspired by Japanese lanterns, and does not use authentic materials or traditional woodworking techniques. Perhaps that’s an important fact to some, but we’ll just say that the materials used seem far less important when the end result looks this good.

Unfortunately [The Big One] hasn’t provided any interior shots of his clock, as it sounds like the aesthetics of the internal wiring isn’t quite up to the standard set by the outside of it. But he has provided a concise parts list, a wiring diagram, and source code, so we’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s under the hood.

The clock is powered by the uBBB 32u4, an ATMega32u4 development board that [The Big One] developed in conjunction with [Warren Janssens]. It uses the popular MAX7219 LED matrix for the display, and a DS3231 RTC module to help keep the time. There’s also a DFPlayer Mini module onboard that allows him to play whatever sound effects or music he wants when the alarm goes off.

Of course the star of the show is the LED strips which illuminate the shōji-style column. These have apparently been wrapped around a coffee can of all things, which not only serves as a convenient way of holding the strips, but [The Big One] says actually makes the speaker sound a bit better. Hey, whatever works.

This isn’t the first “lantern” clock to grace these pages, but compared to the high-tech presentation of previous projects, we can’t help but be impressed by the grace and elegance of this wooden masterpiece.

These Maple Pod Inspired Drones Silently Carry Payloads

November 2, 2019 by 15 Comments

Researchers from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) recently released a video showing their nature-inspired drone that is capable of breaking out into five separate smaller drones. The drones each have auto-rotating wings that slow their rate of descent, similar to seed pods from a maple tree. Due to their design, the drones are only made to be used for a one-way trip, with the five components each carrying a separate payload. The drones are designed to detach within a specified distance from their destination, allow the collective body to safely spiral downwards towards land.

In their paper published on the same subject, the researchers discuss how they optimized the balsa wood wings with servos, a LiPo battery, and a receiver attached to a 3D-printed body. Four are equipped with just these components, while the fifth also holds a 3-axis magnetometer, a Teensy 3.5 board, a GPS module, and a Pixracer controller.

They experimented with several motion capture setups and free-flight drop tests to verify their simulations on the models for the drones. Apart from simply detaching, they are also designed to cater to different mission profiles based on the environment they are dropped in.

We’ll admit that the implementation and design of the drones does seem fairly dystopian, especially when you wonder what could possibly be the payloads these drones are designed to carry. But in terms of nature-inspired robotics, the maple seed pod idea is pretty interesting.

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Turntable Spins Color And Sound Together

October 27, 2019 by 5 Comments

If you can’t grow your own synesthesia, buying electronics to do it for you is fine. Such is the case with the CHROMATIC by [Xavier Gazon], an artist who turns all kinds of electronics into circuit-bent musical art pieces. His project turns an old Philips Music 5120 turntable into a colorful MIDI sequencer, inspired by older 20th century instruments such as the Optophonic Piano and the Luminaphone.

The CHROMATIC uses colored pucks placed on a converted turntable to perform a looping sequence of chords in a given musical scale, generating MIDI data as output. Where its inspirations used primitive optics as their medium, this project employs a Teensy microcontroller and two modern optical sensors to do the work. One of these is a simple infrared sensor which tracks a white spot on the edge of the turntable, generating a MIDI clock signal to keep everything quantized and in sync. The other is a color sensor mounted on the tone arm, which can tell what color it sees and the height of the arm from the turntable.

While the instrument is still in beta testing phase details on how notes are generated aren’t yet given, though the general idea is that they are dictated by the color the tone arm sees and its position above the platter. Moving the tone arm changes which pucks it tracks, and the speed of the turntable can also be adjusted, changing how the melody sounds.​

The CHROMATIC is a very interesting project, but it’s not the first optical-based turntable hack we’ve seen here. We’ve also seen a much weirder use for a color sensor, too. Check out the video of this one in action after the break.

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