Phillips AmbX Dissected

April 21, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 22 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjSv2VNKnvY]

Electrosthetics has taken it upon themselves to open up and explore the insides of a Phillips AmbX system. The unit is supposed to help immerse you in your video games by adding ambient lighting, vibration, and wind. They got the starter kit, which is missing some bits. Interestingly they found that the hardware was not hampered in any way. You could plug in fans and such and, in theory, build the larger kit. There are lots of pics of the various pieces for you to look at. They note that the hardware all seems decent, but it’s the software that really causes issue. On their Vista64 dual core machine, the software was eating up an entire core to do ambient lighting.

Bohemian Rhapsody On Old Hardware

April 19, 2009 by Eliot 24 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ht96HJ01SE4]

Here’s another junk music performance to add to the list. [bd594] put together this rendition of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody on assorted computing equipment. The lead piano sound is from an Atari 800XL. Lead guitar is a Texas Instruments TI-99/4a. An 8inch floppy plays bass while a HP ScanJet 3C covers the vocals. He had to dub the scanner four times to get all of the vocal parts. He wanted to use four independent scanners but the prices on eBay were forbidding. The use of oscilloscopes to show the wave forms in the video is a nice touch. Check out our post about Radiohead’s Nude for more examples of this.

[via adafruit]

Wiitar, A Build Log

April 17, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 13 Comments

wiitar

[Ozan] sent in this build log from when he made a Wiitar. As you can probably guess from the title, it’s a guitar combined with a wiimote. He has completely gutted the Wiimote and installed the internals in the guitar. Some toggle switches were mounted to control the button states on the Wiimote. This is a pretty useful setup as you can use the Wiimote data to control effects on the guitar. We’ve actually seen a very similar setup before. [Ozan] has included the build log, as well as a simple glovepie script and a sample effect patch.

Bent Festival Begins Tonight

April 16, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 48 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6Pbyg_kcEk]

The Bent festival, which begins tonight in New York City, is a celebration of DIY musical instruments. Artists from all over converge to beep, blip, and strum for your pleasure. With a heavy emphasis on hacking your own instruments, this is definitely something we’re interested in. If you’ve only heard a little bit of circuit bending and didn’t like it, you may want to give it a try anyway. The musical genres are extremely diverse, it’s not all just random noise.

Mini Arcade Cabinets

April 15, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 23 Comments

mini-arcade

[Pocket_Lucho] has really done a fantastic job on this one. He’s making miniature arcade cabinets(translated) from old consoles. This post is mainly talking about a Sega genisis version, but he’s also done one for the PC engine(aka turbografix 16). He takes us through pulling RGB video strait from the chip as well as harvesting buttons from a cheapo all in one arcade controller. For the screen he’s using a PSone portable LCD, pretty much un modified. What really stands out is the final layout. He has built tiny arcade cabinets, about a foot tall, to house them. These are amazingly awesome and we want one. No, we want an entire mini arcade of them. You can see a video after the break.

Continue reading “Mini Arcade Cabinets” →

Beat Boxxx And Speak To Me/Breathe

April 14, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 13 Comments

[vimeo=4038918]
[Steve] is in the MFA Design and Technology program at parsons, and as part of his studies, has built a couple really interesting projects. First, the Beat boxxx, as seen in the video above, is an 80’s retro looking portable beat looper. You create and loop your beats at the time of playing using simple hand gestures. The look is great, for those who enjoy cardboard and magic marker, though we think some tonal variation and possibly a wider pitch variation would really make this fun.

His second project is Speak to Me/Breathe. This project was meant to be a commentary on security in our daily information. He is visually displaying the braille symbols to spell out his emails. If any person were to spend the effort, they could decipher his emails. The finish on this project is quite nice, you can see a video of the display after the break.

Continue reading “Beat Boxxx And Speak To Me/Breathe” →

The CrunchPad Tablet Shows Its Face

April 10, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 9 Comments

crunchtablet-1

After a few pictures of the CrunchPad tablet leaked onto the internet, Crunchgear decided to release some more info. The prototypes you see are fully functional, have Intel Atom processors, and a 12 inch capacitive touchscreen. There isn’t much else available yet as far as details. What we’re most curious about is how the interface works. As many people who have used tablet PCs or touchscreens know, it’s usually the software interface that makes or breaks the experience. We’ve been curious since TechCrunch talked about what netbooks should be. Can’t wait for some videos.