Tempo Keeping Drummer Leaves Viking Ship, Now Inspires Pedallers

June 13, 2014 by 12 Comments

Bike Controlled Drum Machine

[Serdef] wrote in to tell us about a project he has recently created. It’s a drum beat generator that changes tempo depending on how fast you pedal your bike. This flies directly in the face of using music to keep your pedal timing consistent and up to speed.

The project started out with a tap-tempo drum rhythm pedal that [Serdef] had previously built. This device will generate a drum beat at a tempo corosponding with the time between 2 input signals. This type of device allows someone, say a guitarist, to quickly and easily specify the speed of the drumbeat that they are playing along with.

With the meat and potatoes of the project already figured out, the next part was to make the speed of the bike trigger the tempo of the drum beat. For the signal input, a magnet mounted on the wheel triggers a reed switch mounted on the bike fork once per wheel revolution. This is the same method of information gathering that a bicycle speedometer/odometer uses.

The business part of this project includes an Arduino that measures the speed of the wheel via the magnetic switch, adjusts the speed of the drum beat, and then sends the drum beat to a synthesizer via MIDI protocol. The synthesizer converts the MIDI signal into drum sounds amplified through a powered speaker that the rider can hear. The entire system is powered by a 9v battery and housed in a project box strapped to the bike’s handlebars.

All of the design files and Arduino code are available via [Serdef’s] excellent write up on hackaday.io in case you’re interested in making one for yourself.

Home Made Oculus Rift

OpenVR: Building An Oculus Rift For Only $150

June 13, 2014 by 39 Comments

The Oculus Rift is a really cool piece of kit, but with its future held in the grasp of Facebook, who knows what it’ll become now. So why not just build your own? When the Oculus first came out [Ahmet] was instantly intrigued — he began researching virtual reality and the experience offered by the Oculus — but curiosity alone wasn’t enough for the $300 price tag. He held off until he had a useful purpose for it, and as it turns out he did — he builds and flies multicopters, for which an FPV setup would be super handy!

Other FPV setups cost close to $300 as well, so getting a device with more features just makes sense. Promptly after realizing this, he faced the Maker’s Dilemma: Buy it, or build it? To test the waters, he decided to order some aspheric lenses to do some quick tests with a smart phone and a ghetto cardboard box setup — the results were surprisingly good. No turning back now!
The hardware consists of:

  • 5.6″ 1280×800 LCD
  • 3D printed enclosure
  • 12V power adapter
  • USB to TTL
  • 50mm aspheric lenses (5X zoom)
  • Arduino Mini Pro
  • GY-85 9DOF IMU
  • Various wires, foam padding, and glue

The majority of the cost here is in the LCD, with everything else being pretty inexpensive. Once it’s all built (details on his blog), it is time to get the software, downloaded right off of GitHub. The rest is pretty self-explanatory — just take a look at the results! We’re even tempted to build one now. Videos below.

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NYC Resistor Heats Up The Big Apple With The 2014 Interactive Show

June 13, 2014 by 5 Comments

 

TitleNYCRBehind a nondescript loading dock in Brooklyn stands a normal looking brick building. Go up 3 narrow flights of stairs – you’ll find yourself at the door to the awesome known as NYC Resistor. Last Saturday, NYC Resistor held their 5th Interactive Show, and Hackaday was there! Much like the city it calls home, the Interactive Show is a melting pot. This particular pot is filled with NYC Resistor members (and the public) showing off their projects, NYU’s Tish School ITP students displaying their interactive art, and a good heaping portion of old fashioned hacker partying.

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THP Entry: SatNOGS

June 13, 2014 by 10 Comments

NOGS Here’s an interesting thought: it’s possible to build a cubesat for perhaps ten thousand dollars, and hitch a ride on a launch for free thanks to a NASA outreach program. Tracking that satellite along its entire orbit would require dozens of ground stations, all equipped with antennas, USB TV tuners, and a connection to the Internet. It’s actually more expensive to build and launch a cubesat than it costs to build a network of ground stations to get reasonably real-time telemetry from a cubesat. The future is awesome and weird, it seems.

This is the observation the guys behind SatNOGS have made. They’re developing a platform for a completely open source ground station network, with the idea being people an institutions along every longitude and latitude would build a simple satellite tracking antenna mount, connect it to the Internet, and become part of an open source Near Space Network, capable of receiving telemetry from any one of the small cubesats whizzing around in low earth orbit.

Despite being what is probably one of the most ambitious and far-reaching projects in open source hardware, the design of the system is relatively simple: the hardware is a 3D printed alt-az mount, capable of pointing a pair of antennas anywhere in the sky. The stepper motor driver board is based on the Arduino, and the computer running each antenna node is powered by a BeagleBone Black or a WR703N router. The antenna receiver is, of course, an RTL-SDR dongle, capable of listening to all the common cubesat bands. Even the software is derived from open source projects. Tracking a satellite across the sky can be calculated with GPredict, and the team is working on an observation scheduling and management system that combines multiple ground stations for coverage across the globe.

It’s a great idea, crowdsourcing satellite tracking from people around the globe, and something that could be used by hundreds of institutions lucky enough to launch a small cube of electronics into orbit.

SpaceWrencherThe project featured in this post is an entry in The Hackaday Prize. Build something awesome and win a trip to space or hundreds of other prizes.

‘Ol Painless Paintball Mini-gun Packs A Mean Punch

June 13, 2014 by 33 Comments

Ol Painless Mini Gun

Remember Predator? Of course you do. This is [Corsae’s] personal paintball gun rendition of one of the guns from it, ‘Ol Painless.

It’s a beautiful piece of work with countless man-hours going into its creation. At the core is an off-the-shelf EGO 08 paintball gun with a 20″ barrel. The barrel spacers are made out of MDF, cut by hand using a jigsaw with a barrel guide. The guide itself was made on a CNC router — too bad he couldn’t use it for everything! Each barrel is a thick-walled aluminum tube, carefully fit into the guides, and spray painted matte black for a clean finish. Sadly, they are only for aesthetics, as the paint balls shoot out through the central barrel only.

Not to worry though — while the paint balls may not come out of the barrels, the whole thing spins menacingly, which brings us to our favorite part of the project — the electronics. With help from his friend he designed a custom Arduino shield to control the motor, status LEDs and solenoid trigger. It’s fairly basic, but cool nonetheless. It features some wire connectors, diodes, an LED and the motor driver. Since the PCB fabrication cost included screen printing, he even threw on a mini-gun logo.

He’s done great job documenting the entire project in a photo gallery, with lots of notes along the way — stick around after the break to see a video of it shredding up the field.

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MIDI Melodies Make Moody Milieu

June 12, 2014 by 10 Comments

MIDI piano lights

In this beautiful, well-documented, cat-assisted hack, [capricorn1] adds visual dimension to his impressive piano skills by using his keyboard’s MIDI output to drive Edison bulbs.

He hung them from a rod of electrical conduit pipe and threaded the wires through it to a DB25 connector. The lights are controlled by an Arduino Mega plus a custom shield with an optocoupler to handle zero cross detection. He happened to already have a board with 12 SSRs on it from another project. All of the electronics are in a re-purposed switch box—the switches control four different modes: classic, velocity, scrolling, and automatic. You’ll see the scrolling mode in the video after the jump.

[capricorn1] used a small sampling of the Arduino MIDI Library, namely the note on/off functions and the control change function to handle his sustain pedal. He’s listed the full code for the project, which includes usage of the ipMIDI module for automation over WiFi.

If you don’t have a MIDI keyboard or any Edison bulbs, you could make a MIDI floor piano. You’re required to play both “Chopsticks” and “Heart and Soul” on it, though. Those are like the Hello, World for floor pianos.

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Portal Turret Prop

3D Printed Portal Turret Searches And Destroys

June 12, 2014 by 11 Comments

Ah yes, Portal — one of the most iconic puzzle games from this past decade by Valve. [Yvo] just put the finishing touches on his fully 3D printed, working, Portal Turret. Well — it doesn’t have guns — but it does just about everything else!

This intricate prop replica has attention to detail written all over it. [Yvo’s] carefully designed it to actuate as close to the video game model as possible. Its eye and arms move, has a targeting laser and even features a camera for color based object tracking. You can also play around with it using a joystick — but it’s much more fun to leave on autonomous mode.

Because the whole thing is 3D printed, [Yvo] has also made up an Instructable for making your own, and according to him, it’s not that hard to build! This isn’t his first rodeo either, if you remember the awesome GlaDOS we shared last year — that’s his too.

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