Robotic Guitar Like Instrument

April 29, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 21 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxLTJmmyqn4]

This guitar bot is part of the Legue of Electronic Musical Urban Robots, or LEMUR. As you can see in the video, it has 4 strings, each mounted on it’s own unit. The pitch is controlled by a sliding bridge, while the strings are plucked by a series of picks mounted to motor. The sliding bridge is quite fast, being able to shift 2 whole octaves in a quarter of a second. The final effect is quite nice, we would listen even if we weren’t watching a robot work. This is the kind of thing we should expect to see at the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition.

[via Hacked Gadgets]

Human Powered Electric Instruments

April 28, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 21 Comments

music

[Noah] tipped us off to his work with Physically Engaged Electronic Instruments. He is building instruments, that while being electronic, require physical action to drive them. In the video after the break, you can see an example, in the form of a polka. The part that they’re holding (print head?) is attached to a generator which powers the instrument. The effect makes the instrument much more like a traditional stringed instrument that must be strummed. We can easily also imagine an interface similar to a concertina or accordion being functional. There are schematics available on his site in the research reports section, but you’ll have to dig through a pdf or two to find them. We would love to see a breakdown of the instruments and their components in a more accessible form.

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Electrostatic Computer Interface

April 28, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 24 Comments

[vimeo=4366452]
[Justin] sent in his 1st place winning project from Northeastern’s Electrical Engineering Senior Design Capstone. It’s an interface that uses electrostatics to detect your hand position above it. As you can see in the video, it has decent resolution and can detect position on all 3 axes. When they uncover it, you can see the sensors arranged in a grid. They point out that each sensor isn’t just like a button, but rather detects a range of motion. They are using a pic 18×4550 to handle the sensors, which then communicates to the PC via USB. This could be pretty useful for musical performances as well as an alternative interface for people who can’t use a mouse.EO

IPod Spinning Vinyl

April 27, 2009 by Eliot 18 Comments

[vimeo 4353898]

Here’s a quick demo that FAT’s [Theo Watson] put together. It uses the iPod’s accelerometer to measure how fast it’s spinning and plays the sound file accordingly. This only works on the iPod touch 2nd gen because of its curved case. He says scratching is coming next, but currently the app doesn’t know which direction it’s spinning since it’s measuring outward force. This project was done in response to [vanderlin]’s AR scratching that used fiducials on records.

Ipod GPS

April 27, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 6 Comments

ipod_gps

[Benjamin] was working for a GPS company called Nemerix about two years ago and decided to hack together this iPod accessory GPS unit. He is using an Atmel ATmega324 and a Nemerix GPS unit, though he says the GPS unit shouldn’t matter. He is taking advantage of the AiR mode on the iPod which allows a 4 color image to be sent to the screen. There was little information on how to utilize this, but BMW and Alpine had made some car audio that featured this. [Benjamin] picked up an Alpine with this function and sniffed the data stream to get what he needed. He says there is good documentation out there now though.

He says that the source code is available if you ask.

Analog Audio Recorded On A Floppy

April 24, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 33 Comments

floppy_audio

[Jeri ellsworth] of fatmanandcircuitgirl.com has made an audio recorder out of a floppy disk and an old tape recorder. She’s able to record 15 seconds of audio directly to floppy disk. In the video after the break, she explains how it works, and why you hear the creepy reverb effect. The next step is to run this as a pedal effect for stage music, and she even mentions doing a larger hard drive version with the ability to seek tracks.

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Condenser Microphone Building

April 22, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 28 Comments

mic

Browsing around today, this project caught our eye. Mainly due to the visual similarity to, well, personal massagers. As it turns out, it’s a home made studio condenser microphone. We would generally prefer to link directly to his personal page, that has a slightly more in dept write up, but it has popups and pop unders, so enter at your own risk. Generally condenser mics require phantom power to make the magic happen, but he has included a circuit to run them off of 9v batteries. We’ve done condenser mics before, but this seems a bit quicker and dirtier.