WiFi Streaming Radio

December 19, 2008 by Eliot 9 Comments

wifiradio

[Jeff] is continuing to work on his WiFi streaming radio project and is now into part 7. The reason it’s taken so long is because he’s bothering to document every single piece of the system instead of assuming too much of the reader. The core of the system is an Asus WL-520GU wireless router. It is supported by OpenWRT and has a USB port for use with an external audio card. mpd, Music Player Daemon, is used for playback. This latest part features adding an LCD display for the current track. The router board already has points for the serial port, so it’s just a matter of adding an AVR to talk to the LCD. The next step is building a simple user interface and then boxing everything up. You can view a video of the display below.

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Nandhopper 1-Bit Noise Synth

December 18, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 11 Comments

synth

Sometimes, a little bit of noise can be fun. This little noise synth called the Nandhopper, is a quick simple project to get started. The parts list is pretty short, mainly material for the sensors and a 4093 Quad, 2-input Schmitt trigger and NAND gate. You end up with an easy to use, fairly small 1-Bit synth. If you don’t know what a 1-Bit synth sounds like, watch the demo video. Sure, it just sounds like noise to us, but that’s music to some people.

Multitouch Pinball Instrument

December 9, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 9 Comments

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

This is an interesting twist on multi touch input. [s9lucas] is using a simple multitouch system as an instrument that uses solenoids and pinballs to make music. He has taken the basic multitouch tutorial and combined it with an Arduino bell tower. The end result is possibly more fun to watch than it is to listen to, but that’s fine.

Tesla Coil Guitar Amp

December 7, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 18 Comments

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

You’ve probably seen musical Tesla coils already. People have wired them up to computers and keyboards to make them serve as dangerous and awesome speakers. This video popped up of someone playing his guitar through one. It is rough, and not very good at polyphony, but still cool. We would like to see several coils, split by different filters to be able to hear more of the guitar chords. If only someone had rigged these up for Queen when Flash Gordan was made.

Nintendo DS OSC Support

December 6, 2008 by Eliot 22 Comments

dsmi

OpenSound Control protocol is an emerging standard for communication between musical programs. It’s meant to replace MIDI. The DSMI, DS Music Interface, team has just added support for OSC. You can now use your DS as generic OSC music controller over WiFi. OSC has TCP/IP support built in, so there is no need to run a host sever to talk to DSMI like you did when they only supported MIDI. We’ve seen OSC used in other projects like the monome. It’s also the basis for the multitouch communication protocol TUIO.

[via CDM]

Wiimote Finger Tracking Music Controller

December 2, 2008 by Eliot 7 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7uLuYG62sY&fmt=18]

The Evolution Control Committee has been doing live mashup performances for many years and recently upgraded their hardware. Inspired by [Johnny Lee]’s Wiimote whiteboard, they built a rear projection display they could use during performances. It displays a dense collection of samples in Ableton Live. On each of the performer’s hands is an IR LED mounted to a thimble. By touching the thumb to the forefinger, the LED turns on. Two Wiimotes watch for these IR flashes to trigger mouse clicks. [TradeMark G] found the Ableton display too complex to navigate quickly and accurately with a mouse; this new display make things much easier and enjoyable.

[via Laughing Squid]

MIDI Drums For Guitar Hero And Rock Band

November 30, 2008 by Eliot 18 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a497Hom8Gg&fmt=18]

Embedded above is [egyokeo]’s solution for using MIDI drums with Guitar Hero. He’s playing a DrumKAT MIDI kit. It connects to a PC running his MIDI Hero software, which handles timing and multinote combinations. The PC uses a USB ToolStick microcontroller to send commands to the console using an FPS adapter or soldered into the instrument. It’s a fairly good solution if you’re building a generic controller and need to modify the signaling.

When Rock Band was first released, modders sought to adapt their MIDI drum kits for use with the game. The easiest solution they found was Highly Liquid’s MSA-P. It’s a photorelay based MIDI decoder. You need to solder directly to the brain in the Rock Band drums. If you’re planning on modding any instrument, check the compatibility matrix first. Hopefully you’ll end up with something that can be used across multiple games.

[via Gizmodo]