[Wei] salvaged the internals from an Airport Express that had a blown power supply. From there he built this streaming music box. The case is from an IKEA clock with the face removed. He added some decorative fabric around a grill to make an acoustically transparent front panel. Inside you’ll find the Airport guts connected to a USB charger (replaces the dead PSU) and a set of powered stereo speakers. This simple mashup looks good and frees up space in your junk-parts box.
There was a time when a drummer would grab some sticks and lay out a groove using the items around him as instruments. [Lsa Wilson] would rather not work quite that hard and has chosen to do the same thing by tapping on an iPhone screen. As you can see in the clip after the break, many of the items in the room around him have been fitted with solenoids. Each is connected to an Arduino which is then controlled by Open Sound Control and interfaced with the iPhone via TouchOSC. We love the sounds being created and can’t help being reminded of the Multixylophoniomnibus.
Want to take back control of how your digital audio files become sound? One thing you can do is to build your own digital to analog converter. This one is made from discrete components, centered around a resistive ladder. Yes, there are a couple of integrated circuits in there which are used for demultiplexing the incoming signal but the magic happens in that R-2R network. The project is an interesting read and makes a point of looking at the issues raised when trying to precision match resistors. Apparently it can be done with 0.1% components if you have a lot of them and a multimeter that can measure down to seven decimal places.
[Thanks Bigbob]
[Ewan Hemingway] tipped us off about his new Android app, Androidome. This is the first one he’s turned out after going through our Android development tutorials. It combines an app running on his Android 2.1 device with a computer running Max/MSP 5. The two don’t needed to be tethered, they just need to be on the same wireless network. This won’t be the best solution if you’re doing live performances, as the buttons on the screen end up being quite small. But as you can see after the break, it’s a great way to get into working with the Monome interface and decide if you want to build a dedicated physical version of the tool.
[Dave] pulled the head unit out of his dashboard to add an iPod input. He took a much more invasive route than the other hack we saw a few days ago. He actually patched into the audio lines going from the Dolby reader head chip to the amplifier.
The first step was to trick the deck into thinking it had a cassette inserted. He scoped an enable pin on one of the chips to discover the timing and emulated that signal using a PIC microprocessor. From there he popped off the chip that reads the tape data, patching directly into the audio out traces. This presented some noise issues when charging the iPod but [Dave] fixed that with some decoupling capacitors.
[MicroMinded] took us way back to our childhoods with his experiments and subsequent YMstream music player based on the Yamaha YM2149 sound generator used in old arcade systems, computers, and even phones (think chiptune). This reminds us of the Chipophone, only this time the sound is achieved from ICs used back in the day, rather than MCU waveforms.
There is still some work to be done to make the music player have a bit more functionality, but for now source is available if you want to make your own. Of course you might come across a small problem; finding an SSG is a tad bit more difficult than say, an Arduino. If a good resource is found, please share it in the comments!
[Thank you Andrew Kretschmer for sending in the chiptune mp3s]
Tape decks in cars? Yes, that used to be quite common before optical media took over road. [Nirav Patel’s] 2004 Toyota Corolla had a deck that he used with a tape adapter in order to listen to music from his iPhone. But one day something happened and, although the adapter still worked, the cassette player started making distracting noises. [Nirav] set out to quiet the noise and install an auxiliary audio input for the sound system. There were some tripping points along the way, like breaking everything and starting a small fire, but perseverance got him to his goal. Because these units are built with compatibility for things like CD changers they have a communications bus called AVC-Lan. This protocol has been sniffed out and documented, and [Nirav] even found an existing audio-input hack that he based his design around. Now he’s able to plug directly into the dash and ditch the cassette adapter.
We’ve seen [Nirav’s] work a few times before. He’s shown us a first person shooter controller and his site was a resource in our Launchpad programming with Linux post.
[via Make]
