Building A Breath-Controlled MIDI Device

May 19, 2023 by Lewin Day 6 Comments

When we think of MIDI devices, we typically jump straight to drum machines, rack synths, and keyboard controllers. However, there’s nothing saying you can’t build your own MIDI controllers that use the magic of breath to do their musical duty. That’s precisely what [Xavier Dumont] did with this unique 3D printed build.

The device looks somewhat like an alien ship from an animated 1960s sci-fi movie, but it’s actually a sophisticated MIDI controller. Naturally, it’s peppered with buttons as every good controller should be, and it features a touch-control strip on the back.

However, the real magic is in the breath control. When the user blows into the sensor, the device sends out MIDI signals of varying intensity to control the object of the player’s desire. The breath signal can be used to modulate the mod wheel, pitch bends, or octave shifts, among a variety of other options.

[Xavier] wields the instrument with prowess in the audio demos at the end of the video. We can imagine this futuristic thing being played by a background alien in a celebration scene in a far-flung Marvel movie. Or maybe Star Wars? In any case, a triumph.

Continue reading “Building A Breath-Controlled MIDI Device” →

A view of the inside of a car, with drivers wheel on the left and control panel in the middle, with red LED light displayed in the floor area under the drivers wheel and passenger side.

Bass Reactive LEDs For Your Car

April 25, 2023 by Abe Connelly 32 Comments

[Stephen Carey] wanted to spruce up his car with sound reactive LEDs but couldn’t quite find the right project online. Instead, he wound up assembling a custom bass reactive LED display using an ESP32.

The entirety of the build is minimal, consisting of a GY-MAX4466 electret microphone module, a KY-040 encoder for some user control and an ESP32 attached to a Neopixel strip. The only additional electronic parts are some passive resistors to limit current on the data lines and a capacitor for power line noise suppression. [Stephen] uses various enclosures from Thingiverse for the microphone, rotary encoder and ESP32 box to make sure all the modules are protected and accessible.

The magic, of course, is in the software, with the CircuitPythyon ulab library used to do the heavy lifting of creating the spectrogram and frequency filtering. [Stephen] has made the code is available on GitHub for those wanting to take a closer look.

It wasn’t very long ago that sound reactive LEDs used to be a heavy lift, requiring optimized FFT libraries or specialized components to do the spectrogram. With faster and cheaper microcontroller boards, we’re seeing many great projects, like the sensory bridge or Raspberry Pi driven LED spectrogram, that can now take spectrograms and Fourier transform calculations as basic infrastructure to build on top of them. We’re happy to see [Stephen] leverage the ESP32’s speed and various circuit Python libraries to create a very cool LED car hack.

Video after the break!

Continue reading “Bass Reactive LEDs For Your Car” →

Read Comic Books On The Commodore 64 With StripStream

April 20, 2023 by Lewin Day 3 Comments

Comic books are traditionally printed on paper, either as regular saddle-bound issues or in hardcover compilations. If you wanted to read them on a low-resolution screen run by an 8-bit computer, you were usually out of luck. Until now! Enter StripStream, the comic book reader for the Commodore 64.

StripStream runs on a stock PAL C64 system, using the Datasette interface. A PC program is used to compose a comic into a suitable format for the C64. It then generates a .TAP file which can either be played in a C64 emulator, or recorded onto an audio tape for loading on real hardware.

According to [janderogee], who created the software, just 34 minutes of tape can store over 300 images and 1200 lines of subtitle text. Cassettes were chosen for the storage method as standard 5 1/2″ C64 disks could only hold 165 kilobytes of data per side, meaning two whole double-sided disks would be needed to store the same amount of data. Plus, the linear nature of tape makes sense for a sequentially-read comic story. Just don’t get any ideas about doing a choose-your-adventure thing here, as StripStream isn’t built for random access.

If you don’t want to read regular comics, you can always use a tool to automatically generate them from existing media. Incidentally, StripStream is a great name, but we would have called it Comicdore 64.

Continue reading “Read Comic Books On The Commodore 64 With StripStream” →

Illuminated smart curtain in front of a window, beside a Christmas tree

Smart LED Curtain Brings Sprites To Your Windows

January 14, 2023 by Dave Walker 13 Comments

Mobile interface for LED smart curtain display — A mobile interface is a nice touch

Anybody who has ever seen a video wall (and who hasn’t?) will be familiar with the idea of making large-scale illuminated images from individual coloured lights. But how many of us have gone the extra mile and fitted such a display in our own homes? [vcch] has done just that with his Deluxe Smart Curtain that can be controlled with a phone or laptop.

The display itself is made up of a series of Neopixel strips, hung in vertical lines in front of the window. There is a wide gap between each strip, lending a ghostly translucent look to the images and allowing the primary purpose of the window to remain intact.

The brains of the system are hosted on a low-cost M5stack atom ESP32 device. The data lines for the LEDs are wired in a zig-zag up and down pattern from left to right, which the driver software maps to the rectangular images. However, the 5V power is applied to the strips in parallel to avoid voltage drops along the chain.

If you’d like to build your own smart curtain, Arduino sketch files and PHP for the mobile interface are included on the project page. Be sure to check out the brief video of what the neighbors will enjoy at night after the break.

If video walls are your kind of thing, then how about this one that uses Ping Pong Balls as diffusers? Continue reading “Smart LED Curtain Brings Sprites To Your Windows” →

A two picture montage of a boy wearing a sonic the hedgehog costume with LEDs in them. The left picture is at night with the boy wearing sunglasses and a face mask with the sonic costume head piece lit up. The right picture is during the day with the boy wearing a face mask, holding a plastic pu mpkin bucket for candy and wearing a lit up sonic the hedgehog costume in the front yard of a house.

LEDs Put New Spin On A Sonic The Hedgehog Costume

November 26, 2022 by Abe Connelly 1 Comment

[Wentworthm] couldn’t say no to his son’s plea for a Sonic the Hedgehog costume for Halloween but also couldn’t resist sprucing it up with LEDs either. The end result is a surprisingly cool light up Sonic the Hedgehog costume.

After some experimentation, [Wentworthm] ordered two costumes and ended up mixing and matching the head piece of one with the body suit of the other. For the head, [Wentworthm] created six 3D printed “quills” that had slots for the WS2812B LED strips to slide into and diffuse out the sides, with each quill sliding into the folds of the Sonic head “spikes”. Sewn strips of cloth were used to house the LED strips that were placed down the sides of the costume. An additional 3D printed switch housing was created to allow for a more robust interface to the two push buttons to activate the LEDs. An Arduino Nano, soldered to a protoboard, was used to drive the LED strips with a USB battery pack powering the whole project.

[Wentworthm] goes into more detail about the trials and errors, so the post is definitely worth checking out for more detail on the build. Halloween is always a great source of cool costumes and we’ve featured some great ones before, like a light up crosswalk costume to making a giant Gameboy colour costume.

Video after the break!

Continue reading “LEDs Put New Spin On A Sonic The Hedgehog Costume” →

Screenshot from the video showing comparisons between diffused light pictures at different brightnesses and diffusers applied

LED Diffusers Confusing? Organize A Practical Contest

November 3, 2022 by Arya Voronova 8 Comments

We all want a nice and shiny LED strip that doesn’t actually look like it consists of individual LEDs – a bar of uniform light is just that much more attractive. There’s all kinds of diffusion options available out there, but they can be confusing – sometimes you’d just like to know, which one is better? If there’s one thing that could easily settle this, it’s a practical test, and that’s what [The Hook Up] has devised for us to learn from.

First off, he talks about LED strips available – between 30, 60 and 144 LED per meter variations, the latter is going to be easier to diffuse than the former. From there, there’s a few different kinds of diffuser covers and aluminum profiles you can get, and [The Hook Up] pairs them in combinations, filming them from a distance and giving us concise visuals of how each combination works at different duty cycles, as well as making brightness measurements every now and then to evaluate losses of different diffuser layers. He proposes a simple rule – when picking a diffuser, distance between the LEDs and the diffuser has to be larger than the between-LED distance, and experiments confirm that. In the end, one of the takeaways is that the differences between 60LED/m and 144LED/m strips are not significant enough that they can’t be compensated for with a decent diffuser.

Continue reading “LED Diffusers Confusing? Organize A Practical Contest” →

Two shots of a Thriller jacket with LED strips being worn by Louise Katzovitz, one from the front and the other from the back.

Thrills With An LED “Thriller” Jacket

October 11, 2022 by Abe Connelly 19 Comments

[Louise Katzovitz] has created a light-up jacket in the style of the jacket worn by Michael Jackson in the 1983 music video for “Thriller”. [Louise Katzovitz]’s Thriller jacket is the perfect example of combining sewing hacks and electronic hacks to make an awesome, wearable jacket.

A bomber jacket was used as the base form to layer on the sequins and LED strips. Instead of bands of metal studs, [Louise] used WS2812B 60 pixels/m LED strips. 3D-printed transparent PLA “gems” were placed on top of the LEDs to mimic the form of the metal studs in the original jacket and provide diffusion for the underlying LEDs.

Each LED strip was laid out on a piece of vinyl strip. Then, a top layer of vinyl was cut to allow each of the LEDs to poke through, with the 3D printed gems super-glued on top. The assembled LED bands are attached to the jacket by Velcro with the wiring fed behind the lining material, which can be removed easily via small hooks. The whole thing is driven by an Arduino Nano and a 5 V power bank.

With the details and process worked out, [Louise] even made a tiny version of the jacket for her dog. We’ve featured LED wearables and fashion before and [Louise]’s jacket is a great addition. These projects are perfect for anyone who wants to wow their friends this upcoming Halloween season. Video after the break!

Continue reading “Thrills With An LED “Thriller” Jacket” →