PVC Percussion Pipe Organ Sounds Surprisingly Good!

May 25, 2014 by 31 Comments

PVC Instrument

Using over 20′ feet of PVC pipe, a whole bunch of 2 x 4’s and a few nuts and bolts, [Jeremy] and his cousin put together a rather unique percussion pipe organ.

[Jackson], his cousin who is a musician is always looking for different ways to make music. They had a rough idea of what they wanted to do with a few sketches, but after a day of tinkering, they ended up with something completely different — but it sounds awesome.

The frame is made of a combination of 2 x 6’s and 2 x 4’s which hold the PVC tubes in place. PVC elbows and varying lengths of pipe create a wide range of rather deep bass notes. It can be played with just your hands, or even a pair of sandals for better effect. You’d be surprised how good it sounds.

Continue reading “PVC Percussion Pipe Organ Sounds Surprisingly Good!” →

Adding Copper Wire To A 3D Print

May 25, 2014 by 24 Comments

Conductive filaments and printing solder are one thing, but what if you could spice up your 3D prints by embedding wire right inside the filament? That’s what [Bas] is doing, paving the way for printable electronics, PCBs, coils, and odd-shaped antenna.

The general idea of [Bas]’ technique of embedding thin copper wire inside a single layer of a print is to lay the wire down in front of the nozzle, effectively turning bare wire into insulated wire in whatever shape you can imagine. The trick, however, is figuring out how to put wire  down in front of a nozzle. [Baz] accomplished this with a slew ring turned by a stepper motor connected to a 5th axis on the control board.

There are a few things this prototype doesn’t cover – cutting the wire, connecting the wire to components, fine-tuning, and a host of other things that prevent [Bas]’ machine from building real functional circuits. Despite these limitations, the machine could probably fabricate the secondary for a tesla coil right now, something that’s really annoying to make unless you have a lathe.

Video demo below.

Continue reading “Adding Copper Wire To A 3D Print” →

Arduino garage door opener

Arduino Garage Door Opener Is Security Minded

May 25, 2014 by 13 Comments

Do it yourself garage door openers must be all the rage nowadays. We just got word of another take on this popular idea. [Giles] was commissioned by his friend to find a way to control the friend’s garage door using a smart phone. The request was understandable, considering the costly garage door remote and the fact that the buttons on the expensive remote tended to fail after a while. The inspiration for this project came from some YouTube videos of other similar projects. Those projects all paired an Arduino with a Bluetooth headset in order to control the door from a mobile phone. [Giles] understood that while this would get the job done, it wouldn’t be very secure. Bluetooth headsets typically connect to mobile phones using a four digit PIN. Many of them have known default PINs and even if the default is changed, it wouldn’t take very long to guess a four digit PIN. [Giles] knew he had to find a more secure way.

Continue reading “Arduino Garage Door Opener Is Security Minded” →

Synergizer: The Emergency Key-Turn Barbot

May 25, 2014 by 10 Comments

Synergizer: Emergency Drink Dispenser

It’s been a rough day at the office. You need a break. But by yourself? No, what you need is to be Synergized! This Barbot only works if all four keys are inserted and turned — kind of like a nuclear launch procedure — only then will it dispense four perfectly sized drinks to make your day better.

The Synergizer uses an Arduino to control a belt driven linear actuator which moves the spout from cup to cup. A series of reed switches along the length provide feedback to the system for positional control. The machine makes use of a peristaltic pump, called the Bartendro Dispenser, which pumps an exact volume of your liquid of choice into each cup. The cool thing with peristaltic pumps is they are self priming,and capable of pumping an exact volume of liquid every time.

[Nick Poole], the designer, also included a CPU fan and heat-sink paired up with a peltier plate in order to also chill the liquid as it is being pumped. To make it even more interesting, he added a four key override, so the Synergizer can only be used if all four unique keys are inserted.

Continue reading “Synergizer: The Emergency Key-Turn Barbot” →

The Automated Pickup Winding Machine

May 24, 2014 by 11 Comments

winderBack when electric guitars were a new thing, winding pickups was a very labor intensive and error-prone process. The number of windings could easily vary by a few hundred turns of wire, making the resulting pickup either anemic or much more powerful than the other pickups in the guitar. [Davide] is starting to wind his own pickups, and desiring a little more precision than simply guessing how many winds are on a coil he built an AVR coil winding machine.

The machine uses a DC gear motor running at 1200 RPM. A magnet is glued onto the motor shaft, and a hall effect sensor connected to an ATMega8 keeps track of how many windings are on the coil.

The interface is simple, using character LCD to display a wind counter, motor direction, and current motor speed. There are some useful features in this machine; slow start-up and automatic stop makes winding pickups much easier than the traditional home method of winding pickups with a sewing machine.

Continue reading “The Automated Pickup Winding Machine” →

VoCore, The Tiny Internet Of Things Thing

May 24, 2014 by 40 Comments

vocoreWith tiny Linux boards popping up like dandelions, it was only a matter of time before someone came out with a really tiny Linux board. This is it. It’s a tiny board less than an inch on each side with an 802.11n System on Chip running OpenWrt on Linux. The best part? You can pick one up for $20 USD.

The VoCore isn’t so much as a cut down ARM dev board as it is a cut down router capable of running OpenWrt. It’s not a power house by any means with 8MB of Flash, 32MB of SDRAM, and a 360MHz CPU, but if you ever need something that’s less than an inch square, you probably don’t need that much power.

The VoCore features interfaces for 100M Ethernet, USB host and device, UART, SPI, I2C, I2S, and 20 GPIOs for blinking LEDs and listening to sensors. There’s also a dock that breaks out the Ethernet and USB ports, available as a kit or already assembled.

It’s a pretty cool device, and with low current draw (about 200mA) and being able to accept +5V power, we can easily see this tiny board popping up in a few projects.

 

Smile Meter Reacts To Your Expressions With Pharrell’s Happy

May 24, 2014 by 2 Comments

MIT's Smile Meter

Here’s a clever use of a webcam and some facial recognition software — They call it Happy ++ and it will DJ [Pharrell’s] Happy according to how much you’re smiling (or not at all!).

It’s another project to come out of MIT’s Media Lab for a spring event this year by [Rob, Dan & Javier]. The facial tracking software was re-used from an older project, the MIT Mood Meter, which was a clever installation that had several zones on campus tracking the apparent “happiness” of the students walking by.

To create the program they’ve split up the song Happy into its various components. Drums, vocals, band, and the full mix. As the webcam recognizes a smile, it records the intensity, which in turn turns up the vocals and band. If no smiling is present there is only a drum beat.  Continue reading “Smile Meter Reacts To Your Expressions With Pharrell’s Happy” →