[Nick] sent in this sweet midi pedal organ. [Seffan] modded an old set of organ pedals with the cheapest midi keyboard he could find. Each pedal was equipped with a switch mechanism, so it was just a matter of patience and wiring. To come up with enough wire for the job, he sacrificed some IDE cables. If you’ve ever played with some organ pedals, you know that these things can really add another dimension to music – especially with the newly added MIDI interface.
Misc Hacks4130 Articles
Soekris Laser Guided Squirrel Trap
Got a bit of a pest problem? [Chad] built a better squirrel/rabbit/thing trap using a soekris box, a laser pointer, serial controlled relay and a small motor. When the laser beam is broken, the Soekris activates the relay, pulling the door pins. Then it take a picture with a webcam and send him a page.
Electric (off-road) Skateboard
[Joe] sent along this sweet little instructable on making an electric skateboard. I like this one especially for the how-to nature of the build. [Vurp] used an off the shelf mountain board with a brake addition, a 300w scooter motor/controller and a pair of 12v SLA batteries. Now that I’m back on campus, I might just be tempted to build something along these lines. Just in time for this electric vehicle post, [Darin] sent in the forkencycle.
Apple IIGS Laptop
I may hit my limit on DIY laptops soon, but [Ben Heck] has been extra quiet for a while. Now we know why. Just after the release of his PS3 laptop comes his Apple IIGS laptop. Thanks to [Ed] for the tip. It features original Apple hardware and even uses the original keyboard PC board. A CF drive adapter replaces the hard drive and a 15 inch screen shows off the true power of 8 bit computing.
Arduino + Nunchuck +espresso = Awesome
Remember the voltage detector that I mentioned a while back? [Tim] hasn’t put up quite enough info to make me happy, but definitely enough to make me jealous. He updated his NES controlled Silvia to become a Wii nunchuck controlled (via Arduino) Silvia. That said, his last couple of blog posts have me questioning just how much espresso he’s been drinking. Theoretically, he could actually program the Silvia to refuse shots to people who are too jittery.
Quick And Easy CNC Setup Tricks
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc-9gTFj-y4&hl=en]
I was considering a laser cross-hair for my mill and found this video of some great setup hacks that [Greolt] put on his mill. The video is pretty short, but I’ll fill you in just in case you don’t want to play/load it. A laser cross-hair is mounted at a known offset to align the X and Y axis. A PC board is wired to a sensor to zero in the Z axis. When the bit makes contact, the machine knows that it’s at 0 + the PCB thickness. A shuttle pro controller adds jog controls and a macro takes care of moving the bit to the zero that was measured with the laser cross-hair. You can find more details on his zero touch setup here.
Dual Core… Arduino?
[John Ryan] posted his dual core Arduino rig on the Arduino forums. These two ATMega168 chips share the same 16Mhz resonator and I2C bus – allowing them to run in semi-parallel. The uC’s don’t actually communicate with each other, but they run rather nicely as concurrent circuits. It’s a pretty interesting method of adding I/O pins to a project for a minimal cost.
