Synchronize Data With Audio From A $2 MP3 Player

June 13, 2016 by Jenny List 32 Comments

Many of the hacks featured here are complex feats of ingenuity that you might expect to have emerged from a space-age laboratory rather than a hacker’s bench. Impressive stuff, but on the other side of the coin the essence of a good hack is often just a simple and elegant way of solving a technical problem using clever lateral thinking.

Take this project from [drtune], he needed to synchronize some lighting to an audio stream from an MP3 player and wanted to store his lighting control on the same SD card as his MP3 file. Sadly his serial-controlled MP3 player module would only play audio data from the card and he couldn’t read a data file from it, so there seemed to be no easy way forward.

His solution was simple: realizing that the module has a stereo DAC but a mono amplifier he encoded the data as an audio FSK stream similar to that used by modems back in the day, and applied it to one channel of his stereo MP3 file. He could then play the music from his first channel and digitize the FSK data on the other before applying it to a software modem to retrieve its information.

There was a small snag though, the MP3 player summed both channels before supplying audio to its amplifier. Not a huge problem to overcome, a bit of detective work in the device datasheet allowed him to identify the resistor network doing the mixing and he removed the component for the data channel.

He’s posted full details of the system in the video below the break, complete with waveforms and gratuitous playback of audio FSK data.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: 8-Bit Arduino Audio For Squares

June 12, 2016 by Elliot Williams 14 Comments

A stock Arduino isn’t really known for its hi-fi audio generating abilities. For “serious” audio like sample playback, people usually add a shield with hardware to do the heavy lifting. Short of that, many projects limit themselves to constant-volume square waves, which is musically uninspiring, but it’s easy.

[Connor]’s volume-control scheme for the Arduino bridges the gap. He starts off with the tone library that makes those boring square waves, and adds dynamic volume control. The difference is easy to hear: in nature almost no sounds start and end instantaneously. Hit a gong and it rings, all the while getting quieter. That’s what [Connor]’s code lets you do with your Arduino and very little extra work on your part.

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Secret Listening To Elevator Music

May 24, 2016 by Elliot Williams 24 Comments

While we don’t think this qualifies as a “fail”, it’s certainly not a triumph. But that’s what happens when you notice something funny and start to investigate: if you’re lucky, it ends with “Eureka!”, but most of the time it’s just “oh”. Still, it’s good to record the “ohs”.

Gökberk [gkbrk] Yaltıraklı was staying in a hotel long enough that he got bored and started snooping around the network, like you do. Breaking out Wireshark, he noticed a lot of UDP traffic on a nonstandard port, so he thought he’d have a look.

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Color-Changing LED Makes Techno Music

April 23, 2016 by Moritz Walter 25 Comments

As much as we like addressable LEDs for their obedience, why do we always have to control everything? At least participants of the MusicMaker Hacklab, which was part of the Artefact Festival in February this year, have learned, that sometimes we should just sit down with our electronics and listen.

With the end of the Artefact Festival approaching, they still had this leftover color-changing LED from an otherwise scavenged toy reverb microphone. When powered by a 9 V battery, the LED would start a tiny light show, flashing, fading and mixing the very best out of its three primary colors. Acoustically, however, it spent most of its time in silent dignity.

As you may know, this kind of LED contains a tiny integrated circuit. This IC pulse-width-modulates the current through the light-emitting junctions in preprogrammed patterns, thus creating the colorful light effects.

To give the LED a voice, the participants added a 1 kΩ series resistor to the LED’s “anode”, which effectively translates variations in the current passing through the LED into measurable variations of voltage. This signal could then be fed into a small speaker or a mixing console. The LED expressed its gratitude for the life-changing modification by chanting its very own disco song.

This particular IC seems to operate at a switching frequency of about 1.1 kHz and the resulting square wave signal noticeably dominates the mix. However, not everything we hear there may be explained solely by the PWM. There are those rhythmic “thump” noises, shifts in pitch and amplitude of the sound and more to analyze and learn from. Not wanting to spoil your fun of making sense of the beeps and cracks (feel free to spoil as much as you want in the comments!), we just say enjoy the video and thanks to the people of the STUK Belgium for sharing their findings.

Hackaday Dictionary: Ultrasonic Communications

April 15, 2016 by Richard Baguley 27 Comments

Say you’ve got a neat gadget you are building. You need to send data to it, but you want to keep it simple. You could add a WiFi interface, but that sucks up power. Bluetooth Low Energy uses less power, but it can get complicated, and it’s overkill if you are just looking to send a small amount of data. If your device has a microphone, there is another way that you might not have considered: ultrasonic communications. Continue reading “Hackaday Dictionary: Ultrasonic Communications” →

The ATtiny MIDI Plug Synth

March 30, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 18 Comments

MIDI was created over thirty years ago to connect electronic instruments, synths, sequencers, and computers together. Of course, this means MIDI was meant to be used with computers that are now thirty years old, and now even the tiniest microcontrollers have enough processing power to take a MIDI signal and create digital audio. [mitxela]’s polyphonic synth for the ATtiny 2313 does just that, using only two kilobytes of Flash and fitting inside a MIDI jack.

Putting a MIDI synth into a MIDI plug is something we’ve seen a few times before. In fact, [mitxela] did the same thing a few months ago with an ATtiny85, and [Jan Ostman]’s DSP-G1 does the same thing with a tiny ARM chip. Building one of these with an ATtiny2313 is really pushing the envelope, though. With only 2 kB of Flash memory and 128 bytes of RAM, there’s not a lot of space in this chip. Making a polyphonic synth plug is even harder.

The circuit for [mitxela]’s chip is extremely simple, with power and MIDI data provided by a MIDI keyboard, a 20 MHz crystal, and audio output provided eight digital pins summed with a bunch of resistors. Yes, this is only a square wave synth, and the polyphony is limited to eight channels. It works, as the video below spells out.

Is it a good synth? No, not really. By [mitxela]’s own assertion, it’s not a practical solution to anything, the dead bug construction takes an hour to put together, and the synth itself is limited to square waves with some ugly quantization, at that. It is a neat exercise in developing unique audio devices and especially hackey, making it a very cool build. And it doesn’t sound half bad.

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Tombstone Brings New Life To Board

March 19, 2016 by Bob Baddeley 24 Comments

Making revisions to existing PCBs with surface mount components often leads to creative solutions, and this insertion of a switch over a tombstoned resistor is no exception. According to [kubatyszko], “this is an FPGA-based Amiga clone. R15 serves as joint-stereo mixing signal between channels to make it easier on headphone users (Amiga has 4 channels, 2 left and 2 right). Removing R15 makes the stereo 100% ‘original’ with fully independent channels. Didn’t want to make it permanent so I decided to put a switch.”

Whether [kubatyszko] intends it or not, this solution is not going to be permanent without some additional work to mechanically secure the switch. We’ve tried this sort of thing before and it sometimes results in the contact area of the resistor being ripped off the substrate and separated from the rest of the resistor, rendering it useless. However, the creative use of the pads to get some additional functionality out of the board deserves some kudos.

We love creative fixes for board problems but it’s been a really long time since we’ve seen several of them collected in one place. We’d love to hear your favorite tricks so let us know in the comments below.