Emulating A Marching Band With Wearable Instruments

May 13, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

[Scott] is a design and technology master’s student who just came up with The Imaginary Marching Band – virtual band instruments you can wear on your hand.

Taking inspiration from Minority Report and the NES Power Glove, the system is able to emulate 6 instruments at this point – A trumpet, trombone, tuba, snare drum, bass drum, and cymbals. The glove itself reads data from a variety of sensors and passes that onto an Arduino Uno which sends serial data back to a computer. This data is then parsed by a Serial – MIDI converter, and can then be played back through a sampler, synthesizer or piped into your sequencer of choice. Happily, [Scott] will be designing custom PCBs for his gloves to cut down on space and weight, and he’ll also be making his project open-source eventually.

[Scott] has a kickstarter page for his project, and so far he’s been on track towards getting this project funded. Check out a demo after the break.

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ChipKIT Max32, An Arduino Mega Upgrade With A PIC32 Under The Hood

May 12, 2011 by Jesse Congdon 91 Comments

For those of you who are looking to put some power behind your Arduino shields, Digilent just released their chipKIT Max32 prototyping platform. The board features a Pic 32 microcontroller, USB programmer and all the things you would typically expect from a development board.

The PIC32MX795F512 is a 32-bit MIPS processor core running at 80Mhz, 512KB flash memory and packs 128KB of SRAM data memory. Digilent also mentions utilizing the Pic’s built in USB 2 controller, 10/100 Ethernet and dual CAN controllers, but these will require shields specific to the chipKIT Max32. The board is also fully compatible with Arduino IDE and libraries as well as MPLAB and the PICKit3 in-system programmer/debugger.

With a price point just below the Arduino Mega 2560 this looks like a great resource for anyone looking to upgrade their Arduino webserver, or just embarrass their Arduino Arduino shield. Maybe it’ll just spawn some interesting gameduino upgrades. It can certainly cut down on extraneous Arduino usage. Either way we’ll be on the lookout to see what this performance bump can bring to table!

Adding A Tachometer To The SX2 Mini Mill

May 12, 2011 by Mike Nathan 13 Comments

sx2_mill_tach

[Jeff] recently bought an SX2 mini milling machine with plans to eventually automate it for use as a CNC mill. After paying nearly $700 for the mill, he decided there was no way he was willing to pay for the $125 tachometer add on as well. Instead, he reverse-engineered the mill and constructed a tachometer of his own.

He opened the control box and started looking around. After identifying most of the components, he got sidetracked by a 3-pin header that didn’t seem to have any particular function. That is, until he realized that a lathe by the same manufacturer uses the same components, and figured that the header might be used for reversing the motor. Sure enough he was right, and after adding a reverse switch, he got back to business.

He probed the 7-pin socket with his logic analyzer and quickly picked out the mill’s data line. He hooked the line up to an Arduino and in no time had the RPM displayed on an LCD screen.

[Jeff] says that this little experiment is the first of many, since the mill is so hacker friendly. We definitely look forward to seeing a CNC conversion tutorial in the near future.

Official Android Open Accessory Development Kit – It’s An Arduino

May 11, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 52 Comments

A new development kit for android was unveiled at the Google I/O 2011 developer conference that officially supports the Arduino.

It looks like Google took a cue from Circuits@Home, because the interesting part of this dev kit is the fact that the shield can be put into USB Host mode. That’s great for phones and tablets that can’t act as a USB host themselves. Google will also release the APIs for this Android/Arduino mashup for 3.1, but it will thankfully be backported to Gingerbread.

We covered the IOIO breakout board for Android last month, but the Google board will be based off of the Arduino Mega 2560, a far more capable device. Interestingly, it appears this board is available now for about $400 USD. We’re not so sure a hobbyist will be buying it at that price.

While this board doesn’t do anything you couldn’t do before with a bluetooth shield, it’s great to see a company supporting all the builders out there.

Arduino Magnetic Core Memory Shield

May 11, 2011 by Mike Nathan 14 Comments

mag_core_memory

Magnetic core memory turns 60 years old today, and as a tribute [Ben North and Oliver Nash] have created a 32-bit magnetic core memory board for the Arduino.

Magnetic core memory was used from the 1950s through the 1970s, and provided a non-volatile means for storing data, as each magnetic core retained its orientation, even when the power was cut. While it sounds a lot like a modern hard drive, these devices were used in the same fashion as RAM is utilized today.

While the pair used surplus ferrite cores manufactured just before magnetic memory stopped being produced, they did allow themselves to use some modern components. Items such as transistors and logic gates were not available to the first magnetic core memory manufacturers, but the use of these items helped them complete the project in a reasonable amount of time.

Their final result is a magnetic memory board which can be used by any USB-enabled device and is reliable enough to withstand billions of read/write transactions.

DIY Sound Localization Sensor

May 10, 2011 by Mike Nathan 32 Comments

sound_localization_sensor

Sound localization is very popular in law enforcement circles due to its accuracy and ability to quickly separate gunshots from other similar noises. These systems don’t come cheap, and after trying to build one himself, [Fileark] knows why.

He thought it would be neat to build a sound localization sensor based on how the human ear determines a sound’s source. Once he got started however, he realized just how hard it was to do localization just right.

He used an LM324N op-amp as a volume comparator, which he says works decently enough though he figures there are ICs out there that can do a better job. [Fileark] reports that the sound detector works well when the source is within about a foot of the sensors, but performance deteriorates at greater distances. He may consider using an ARM Cortex-M3 as his sound processor if he builds a second version, since the Arudino he used just doesn’t have enough power to sample and run calculations within the 10-50 microsecond window he requires.

Keep reading to see a video of his sound localization sensor in action.

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DIY Portal Turret Is… Looking Pretty Good.

May 10, 2011 by Jesse Congdon 19 Comments

[Ryan Palser] wrote in to tell us about his Portal Turret. [Ryan] set about making this Portal 1 style turret by first carving a Styrofoam form, bondo and waxing then casting molds of the various components. Anyone interested in mold making (like us) should check out all the pictures and comments in the stream. The turret’s camera lens style eye has some excellent detail including a laser cut aperture with text inlay. A couple LEDs behind the eye assembly provide the signature red glow and evidently [Ryan] also fitted the little guy with a red laser. An internal Arduino (Incident Resolution Chip?) takes ques from a PIR sensor mounted in one of the turret’s arms to play one of 17 sound clips through a sparkfun MP3 player shield. In order to fight repetition the sound module runs through a playlist of the 17 tracks then shuffles it before playing through again. Theme music can also be spammed by pressing a button in the back of the motion sensing arm. The turret can be battery powered or plugged into a wall socket for constant operation. All that’s missing are the Aperture-Brand Resolution Pellets. We would love to see this integrated with some similar turret projects previously featured here.

Are you still there? We have more Aperture Science stuff including a Sentry Turret, Weighted Companion Cube, and even a portal shirt. If you are interested in more model making check out the spectacular Daft Punk helmet build from a little while back.