Wearable Project Inspiration

October 18, 2008 by Eliot 3 Comments

Yesterday, Gizmodo published a roundup of wearable gadgets for people who “don’t mind looking like a tool”. It’s interesting to see what has been deemed commercially viable and put into mass production. The list covers HMDs, embedded WiFi detectors, integrated keyboards, tech jackets, speaker hats, and others. We thought you might find some inspiration from the list for your next project. In the past, we embedded a WiFi detector in a backpack strap for our Engadget how-to. The natural choice for wearable projects is the LilyPad Arduino which was featured most recently in the turn signal jacket.

[photo: cksthree]

Fender Bender, Weird Sound Guitar

October 15, 2008 by Eliot 9 Comments

[danwagoner] recently completed a restoration of his very first electric guitar. Instead of going the normal route, he modded it to be a Weird Sound Generator. The WSG is a popular kit sold by Music From Outer Space. His creation, dubbed Fender Bender, has a custom pick guard cut from an old motherboard. There are multiple knobs on the pick guard plus three buttons on the neck.

Hacking The Radio Controls In Your Steering Wheel

October 8, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 9 Comments

[Gabe Graham] sent us this step by step process of building a dock for his Zune and hacking is steering wheel controls to work with it. Like many of us, he was not happy with the performance of those little radio transmitters that hook to your mp3 player. He remedied the situation by mounting a dock for his Zune onto the console and patching into his stereo. The sound quality was great, but controlling it was a pain.

He had one button left on his steering wheel that was not needed for anything. He created a custom controller for the Zune that would issue different commands based on how long he held the button on the steering wheel. If the button was held for less than half a second, it would skip tracks, any longer and it would pause. Though he could possibly clean up the look of the LED sticking out of the console, the over all effect is quite well done.

IPod Loaded Horn Boosts Your Tunes

September 23, 2008 by Patrick Lokken 14 Comments

Waveguide IPod dock

The Griffin AirCurve Dock is a nifty gadget that uses a coiled horn to increase the volume of your iPhone’s speaker. Griffin’s marketing claims that their passive device delivers “amazing amplification” and “you’ll swear there are full-sized speakers in there.” Meh. It does look like an interesting project for someone with a 3D printer. You could experiment with different passage and dock shapes. At least it gives us an excuse to post two massive DIY horns.

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PSPSeq 3.0, PSP Sequencer Release And Interview

July 15, 2008 by jimmierodgers 9 Comments

DSPmusic.org has just released the latest version of its homebrew PSP music sequencer PSPSeq 3.0. With PSPSeq you can create songs with up to 16 independent audio tracks, use WAV audio clips of your own and then modify them with a number of settings, or even use some of the built in synthesizers to generate sounds. There are strong looping and recording features as well. If you are into homebrew music apps on the PSP, then this will give you a strong offering of features. We had a chance to catch up with the author, [Ethan Bordeaux], and ask a few questions. You can check out the short interview after the break.

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New Nintendo DS Homebrew Music Apps

June 26, 2008 by Juan Aguilar 2 Comments

The Nintendo DS homebrew scene is heading into a heavily musical interlude with a few new apps. This is good news for anyone who liked Protein DScratch but wanted more options and functionality. More information after the break.

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Making Music With The Eee PC

June 13, 2008 by Eliot 10 Comments

Create Digital Music has been watching the Asus Eee PC closely. The laptop’s portable nature and low price-cheaper than a turntable-have made them desirable to both producers and performers. CDM has collected links to many people that are figuring out how to leverage the lightweight rig. [Dan Stowell] put together a tutorial for SuperCollider, the real time audio synthesis engine. The machine is good for simple text based tracker software too. On the Windows side, a lot of software, like Guitar Rig, can be enabled with just a little display driver hacking. This really makes us wonder when we’ll see the first Eee PC keytar mod.