Vocal Effects On The Arduino Uno

March 12, 2020 by Lewin Day 14 Comments

When one thinks of audio processing, the mind doesn’t usually leap to an 8-bit micro. Despite this, if you’re looking for some glitchy fun, it’s more than possible, as [Amanda Ghassaei] demonstrates with the Arduino Uno in this 2012 throwback project.

The build is designed for vocal effects, based on the idea of granular synthesis. This is where audio samples are chopped up into small chunks, called “grains”, and manipulated in various ways to make fun sounds. Controls on the box allow the nature of the sound created to be modified by the user.

[Amanda]’s project serves as a great example of what it takes to run audio processing on the Arduino Uno. There’s a guide to using the on-board ADC as a microphone input, as well as the construction of a resistor ladder DAC for output. As a neccessity, this also requires discussion of how to write directly to the ATMEGA’s IO ports, rather than using the slower digitalWrite() function typically used in Arduino projects. There’s plenty of value here for anyone learning to do audio on a microcontroller platform.

Overall, it’s a fun project that serves as a good primer for those keen to dive into digital sound processing. Of course, those looking to kick things up a gear would do well to check out the Teensy Audio Library, too. Video after the break.

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Custom Tibia Keyboard For A Leg Up In The Game

March 11, 2020 by Kristina Panos 10 Comments

[Elite Worm] wrote in to tell us about a cool little keyboard designed to make playing a certain game a whole lot easier. One of the ways you can move your character is with the numpad in directional mode plus Control and Shift, but those are too far apart to drive blindly with one hand. This is all the motivation [Elite Worm] needed to build a custom keyboard with only the essentials.

The keyboard is controlled by an Arduino Pro Micro, which is fairly standard for this type of build — it’s usually that or a Teensy. [Elite Worm] used Cherry MX browns for a nice tactile feel, and added LEDs for a purple-white under-glow. We love the way the printed keycaps turned out, and are impressed because tolerances are notoriously tight for those fruity switch stems.

Starting to think of a few uses for a small custom keypad? This thing is wide open, and [Elite Worm] will even send you the PCB files if you ask nicely. See if you can get past the break without your mouse, and check out the build video while you wait.

Want more flexibility? Just use more switches! Continue reading “Custom Tibia Keyboard For A Leg Up In The Game” →

Tiny Duck Hunt Looks Like Big Fun

March 8, 2020 by Kristina Panos 5 Comments

Unless you’ve held on to an old tube TV, did the hack that lets you use a light gun with an LCD via Wiimote receiver and a couple of microcontrollers, or live close to one of those adult arcades, you might be really jonesing to play Duck Hunt by now. It’s time to renew that hunting license, because [Danko] has recreated the game for NodeMCU boards, and it’s open season.

Instead of ducks, you get to shoot cute little Twitter-esque birds of varying sizes and point values, and a tiny cab-over truck if you wish. There’s a 60-second free-for-all, and then time is up and your score is displayed. As a special bonus, there’s no smug dog to laugh at you if don’t hit anything. Be sure to check out the demo and build video after the break.

This pocket console lives on a nicely-wired breadboard for now while [Danko] works on a custom PCB. He’s also planning to add support for Arduboy games in the future, and maybe a joystick instead of a D-pad of buttons.

There are a lot of myths floating around about how the old CRTs read the NES light gun, but our own [Will Sweatman] shot them down in his fascinating Duck Hunt: Reloaded write-up.

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Robot Fights Fire With IR

March 8, 2020 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

Fighting fire with robots may take jobs away from humans, but it can also save lives. [Mell Bell Electronics] has built a (supervised) kid-friendly version of a firefighting robot that extinguishes flames by chasing them down and blowing them out.

This hyper-vigilant robot is always on the lookout for fire, and doesn’t waste movement on anything else. As soon as it detects the presence of a flame, it centers itself on the source and speeds over to snuff it out with a fan made from a propeller and a DC motor.

Here comes the science: fire emits infrared light, and hobbyist flame sensors use IR to, well, detect fire. This fire bot has three of these flame sensors across the front that output digital data to what has got to be the world’s smallest Arduino – the ATmega32U4-based PICO board that [Mell Bell] just so happens to sell. Cover your mouth and nose and crawl along the floor toward the break to see how responsive this thing is.

Firefighters aren’t the only brave humans involved in the process of keeping the forests standing, or who feel the rising pressure of automation. Hackaday’s own [Tom Nardi] wrote a piece on a dying breed called fire lookouts that will no doubt ignite your interest.

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Z80 Computer Is Both Arduino And Shield

March 7, 2020 by Erin Pinheiro 7 Comments

There have been plenty of Z80 computer builds here on Hackaday, but what sets them apart is what you do with them. [Andrew] writes in with his Z80 single-board computer made from scratch, using the Arduino standard headers for its I/O. In turn, since he needed an easy way to program the flash memory which holds the software to run on the Z80, he used an Arduino Mega as a debugger, making the SBC an Arduino shield itself.

Using such a common header pinout for the Z80 computer allows it to be used with a variety of readily-available Arduino shields. This compatibility is achieved with an analog-digital converter and a 3.3 V regulator, mimicking the pins found in an Arduino Uno. The code, available on GitHub, includes an extensive explanation and walkthrough over the process in which the Mega takes over the bus from the Z80 to function as a fully-featured debugger. Programs can be loaded through embedding an assembly listing into the Mega’s sketch, or, once the debugger is up you can also upload a compiled hex file through the serial connection.

This isn’t the first time [Andrew] has been featured here, and his past projects are just as interesting. If you need to translate a Soviet-era calculator’s buttons into English, hack a metallurgical microscope or even investigate what’s that Clacking Clanking Scraping Sound, he’s the one you should call.

Pump Up The (Windows) Volume With Physical Sliders

March 5, 2020 by Kristina Panos 20 Comments

For as long as we can remember, Windows has provided a mixer that breaks out the volume level of every applicable application into its own slider-controlled lane. But navigating to these controls is non-trivial, especially if you’re in a hurry to silence someone on team speak. You have to stop what you’re doing, click the speaker, go into the mixer, and then go find the appropriate slider. Windows won’t respect resizes between mixer visits, so you’ll almost always have some horizontal scrolling to do.

So why on Earth would you put yourself through all of this when you could be pushing physical sliders on the fly like a DJ? A slider is just a potentiometer in a straight line, after all.

These are wired up to an Arduino Nano, which sends the serial data to a Python script on the PC that changes the volume values accordingly for whatever five programs are in the config file. Thanks to a little bit of Visual Basic, the Python script can run in the background.

[Aithorn]’s got everything you need to replicate this, so slide on over and grab the STL files and code. If you get to point where these sliders are too small, just build some bigger ones.

Stop ‘n Go DUPLO

March 3, 2020 by Kristina Panos 8 Comments

[beshur]’s 2-year-old is obsessed with transportation, so he lifted a few DUPLO blocks from the bin and made this toy traffic light as a birthday present. Hey, might as well get him used to the realities of traffic, right? It also makes for a good early hacker lesson: why buy something when you can make it yourself?

The traffic pattern is determined by an Arduino Nano V3 situated inside the carved-out rear block. There’s a push button on the side in case there’s a spill and the lights need to go blinking red until the issue is dealt with. Instead of trying to solder everything in situ and risk melting the plastic, [beshur] dead-bugged the LEDs and resistors to the Nano with a helping hands and then worked everything into the case. The 5mm LEDs fit perfectly into the drilled-out posts of a second block and produce a nice, soft glow. Proceed with caution and check it out after the break.

Of course, plastic building blocks can do real work, too. This LEGO chocolate pantograph is pretty sweet.

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