Hand Made Carbon Fiber Violin Is A Stunning Work Of Craftsmanship

December 8, 2011 by Mike Nathan 40 Comments

carbon-fiber-violin

Building a violin by hand is no easy task, but constructing one out of carbon fiber is an amazing feat! Carpenter [Ken] had never made a violin before, nor built anything substantial out of carbon fiber, and he figured the best way to learn was by doing.

He spent a good bit of time measuring and drawing out his design before making fiberglass molds of the violin’s front and back plates from carved plaster plugs. The process was extremely time consuming, requiring him to make 10 different infusion-molded carbon fiber body plates before he was satisfied with the sound they produced.

With the larger parts of the violin’s body built, he started on the rib molds, which took him 5 hours apiece to set up before injecting the resin. With the body complete, [Ken] was ready to cut the f holes into the violin – a process that required a lot of time hunched over a tank of water with Dremel in hand.

As you can see in the picture above, the final result is stunning – we just wish we could give it a listen to see if it sounds as good as it looks.

Sound Treating A Studio

December 6, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

Looks like [Dino] is getting the band back together. After a junkyard tube amp and a DIY tremolo stompbox, he’s back again, this time doing a bit of sound treatment in his studio.

Most rooms naturally have a bit of flutter echo. You’ll notice this when you move into an apartment or new house – rooms sound a lot more cavernous without rugs, drapes and furniture. Unfortunately, having a bunch of couches doesn’t bode well for the workflow in a studio despite what MTV Cribs may have told us. The usual solution is to put up some sound-absorbing material on the walls, and a metric ton of cardboard egg cartons don’t work.

[Dino] found a bunch of acoustic panels his neighbor threw out during a renovation (yes, we know, he’s very lucky). After doing some pre-installation tests, the panels were hung. Afterwards, the amount of echo was drastically reduced.

The good news is we finally get a look inside [Dino]’s studio. We saw the junkyard tube amp we covered earlier, but not the neat tremolo pedal he made.

Check out [Dino]’s video of sound treating a room after the break.

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Playing Classic 60s Tunes With An All Electronic Band

December 6, 2011 by Mike Nathan 16 Comments

house-of-the-rising-sun

If you are considering repurposing some old computer equipment to create music, be aware that the bar has been raised just a tad. YouTube user [BD594] spent some time sifting through his bin of used electronics and put together a 5-piece band that plays a pretty awesome rendition of The Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun”.

Last week, we saw a pretty impressive hack with a floppy drive that could bang out music using a calculator, but this takes things to a whole new level. [BD594] used an old HP ScanJet to simulate the song’s vocals, while an Atari 800XL combined with an oscilloscope is used as an organ. A Ti-99/4a is used in conjunction with another scope to play guitar notes, while a PIC-controlled hard drive does double duty, playing both the bass drum and cymbals.

We dare you to watch the video below and NOT be thoroughly impressed with his work.

[BD594] says that once he has a bit of free time, he’ll be putting out another video – something we’ll be anxiously waiting to see.

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Musical [Blinky] Candy Tin

December 5, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

Since it’s the holidays and pine trees are being cut down and installed in living rooms all around the world, [Jarv] though it would be a good idea to make a musical Christmas ornament. He needed to keep some of his geek cred, so [Jarv] decided to build a musical [Blinky] ghost from Pacman.

A few weeks ago, [Jarv] sent in his musical greeting card that uses a minimal amount of parts to play a short 8-bit tune. His project was based around an ATtiny85 and sounded pretty good. For his [Blinky] ornament, [Jarv] used a similar circuit along with some old-school Pacman songs that sound great.

[Jarv] found a [Blinky] candy tin and after dispensing with all that pressed sugar began work on his build. In keeping with his greeting card, everything is very minimal. Just a speaker, ATtiny85, and button make up the build. Pressing the button cycles through three songs from Ms. Pacman. The result sounds uncannily like a vintage arcade game, so be sure to check out the video after the break.

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The Force Is Strong With This Christmas Tree Light Show

December 5, 2011 by Mike Nathan 6 Comments

[Zach] is a huge Star Wars fan, and in addition to the array holiday decorations that adorn his house, he says that his wife is nice enough to let him put up a Christmas tree full of Star Wars ornaments. For the past few years, the tree sat in the corner of the room unlit, but his wife thought that it should have some lights this year.

His wife came home with a small string of battery-operated lights, but [Zach] wanted something with a bit more geek cred. He decided to program the lights to play the Star Wars theme song, translating the tune’s pitch to light intensity.

He dug through his bin of electronics and found an MSP430 along with a small target board that would do the job nicely. He sat down with some sheet music, translating the notes to PWM values, resulting in the light show you see below.

While his wife provided a lovely violin accompaniment to the tree, we think that a small audio module would make a great addition to the tree next year.

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Reverse Engineering A Korg Monotribe

December 3, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 19 Comments

Yesterday, Korg released a firmware update to their ribbon controller synth, the Monotribe. The firmware is just an audio file that needs to be played to the sync input of the box. [gravitronic] thought this was rather interesting, so he decided to decode the monotribe firmware. It’s the first step to custom Monotribe firmware, and on the path towards reverse engineering this neat box.

After converting the firmware update to a .wav, [gravitronic] looked at the file with a hex editor and found that each sample is two bytes, and the left and right channels are the same. That made enough sense, so after getting rid of one channel, he sent it through Python to take a look at the patterns of ones and zeros.

Of course, [gravitronic] arbitrarily chose high = 1, low = 0, and little-endianness. The first result didn’t produce a nice “KORG SYSTEM FILE” in the header, so he tried other combinations until the output file looked reasonable. The result is the actual .bin file that’s going to serve as the basis for a nice homebrew firmware. You can grab [gravitronic]’s Python script here and decode your own firmware.

Making Sweet Floppy Drive Music With A Calculator

December 1, 2011 by Mike Nathan 14 Comments

floppy-music-ti83-style

[Chris] says that he’s been pretty busy lately, leaving little opportunity for hacking. However he did manage to find a little time to put together a small project that has occupied his to-do list for a while – a floppy drive music controller.

We have seen hacks that use microcontrollers to actuate floppy drive motors before, but we can’t remember anything that used a calculator to do the job instead. While a microcontroller gives you plenty of I/O pins to play with, [Chris’] Ti-83+ only has two.

Even with the calculator’s I/O limitations, he didn’t find the task too overly difficult as he merely needed to hold a pair of the drive’s pins low, while pulsing two others. He modified a media player written for Ti calculators to output the necessary control signals, then he cranked out some tunes.

As you can see in the video below, his simple setup works quite well – not bad for just a few hours’ work.

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