Finally, An Open Source MIDI Foot Controller

October 21, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 16 Comments

MIDI has been around for longer than most of the readers of Hackaday, and you can get off my lawn. In spite of this, MIDI is still commonly used in nearly every single aspect of musical performance, and there are a host of tools and applications to give MIDI control to a live performance. That said, if you want a MIDI foot controller, your best bet is probably something used from the late 90s, although Behringer makes an acceptable foot controller that doesn’t have a whole bunch of features. There is obviously a need for a feature packed, Open Source MIDI foot controller. That’s where the Pedalino comes in. It’s a winner of the Musical Instrument Challenge in this year’s Hackaday Prize, and if you want a MIDI foot controller, this is the first place you should look.

With the Pedalino, you can change the presets of your guitar rig, turn old MIDI equipment into something that’s USB-compatible, give you hands-free or foot-occupied ways to control your rig during a live performance, and it can be expanded with WiFi or Bluetooth. This is a full-featured MIDI controller, with three user profiles, and it can control a maximum of 48 foot switches. That’s an impressive amount of kit for such a small device; usually you’d have to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars for a simple MIDI controller, and the Pedalino does everything with very cheap hardware.

While the Pedalino is just in its prototype phase now, there is obviously a market for a feature-packed MIDI foot controller. It might just be a breadboard and a Fritzing diagram, but there’s significant work being done on the software side, and we’re looking forward to this being stuffed into a gigantic aluminum enclosure and velcroed to a pedal board.

Can You Build An Open Source Pocket Operator?

October 20, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 20 Comments

Toys are now musical instruments. Or we’ll just say musical instruments are now toys. You can probably ascribe this recent phenomenon to Frooty Loops or whatever software the kids are using these days, but the truth is that it’s never been easier to lay down a beat. Just press the buttons on a pocket-sized computer.

One of the best examples of the playification of musical instruments is Pocket Operators from Teenage Engineering. They’re remarkable pieces of hardware, and really just a custom segment LCD and a few buttons. They also sound great and you can play real music with them. It’s a game changer when it comes to enabling musicianship.

Of course, with any popular platform, there’s a need for an Open Source copy. That’s where [Chris]’ Teensy Beats Shield comes in. It’s a ‘shield’ of sorts for a Teensy microcontroller that adds buttons, knobs, and a display, turning this into a platform that uses the Teensy’s incredible audio system designer.

When it comes to the world of microcontrollers and audio processing, the Teensy is a champ. The Teensy Audio Library has polyphonic playback, recording, synthesis, analysis, and effects, along with multiple simultaneous inputs and outputs. If you’re building a tiny synth that can fit in your pocket, the Teensy is the way to go, and [Chris]’ Teensy Beats Shield does it all, with a minimal and useful user interface. You can check out a video of the Teensy Beats Shield below.

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Hacking Nature’s Musicians

October 20, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 3 Comments

We just wrapped up the Musical Instrument Challenge in the Hackaday Prize, and for most projects that meant replicating sounds made by humans, or otherwise making musicians for humans. There’s more to music than just what can be made in a DAW, though; the world is surrounded by a soundscape, and you only need to take a walk in the country to hear it.

For her Hackaday Prize entry, [Kelly] is hacking nature’s musicians. She’s replicating the sounds of the rural countryside in transistors and PCBs. It’s an astonishing work of analog electronics, and it sounds awesome, too.

The most impressive board [Kelly] has been working on is the Mother Nature Board, a sort of natural electronic chorus of different animal circuits. It’s all completely random, based on a Really, Really Random Number Generator, and uses a collection of transistors and 555 timers to create pulses sent to a piezo. This circuit is very much sensitive to noise, and while building it [Kelly] found that not all of her 2N3904 transistors were the same; some of them worked for the noise generator, some didn’t. This is a tricky circuit to design, but the results are delightful.

So, can analog electronics sound like a forest full of crickets? Surprisingly, yes. This demonstration shows what’s possible with a few breadboards full of transistors, caps, resistors, and LEDs. It’s an electronic sculpture of the sounds inspired by the nocturnal soundscape of rural Virginia. You’ve got crickets, cicadas, katydids, frogs, birds, and all the other non-human musicians in the world. Beautiful.

An Open Controller For Woodwind Instruments

October 19, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

Engineers, hackers, and makers can most certainly build a musical gadget of some kind. They’ll build synths, they’ll build aerophones, and they’ll take the idea of mercury delay line memory, two hydrophones, and a really long tube filled with water to build the most absurd delay in existence. One thing they can’t seem to do is build a woodwind MIDI controller. That’s where [J.M.] comes in. He’s created the Open Woodwind Project as an open and extensible interface that can play sax and clarinet while connected to a computer.

Early prototype to test out variable resistive pressure pads

If you want to play MIDI, there are plenty of options for keyboards, drum sets, matrix pads, and even strings. If you want to play a MIDI saxophone, there aren’t many options. Keytars, for example, are more popular than MIDI woodwind controllers. [J.M.] is changing this with a MIDI controller that recreates electronic aerophones electronically.

The controller itself uses a Teensy 3.2 loaded up with an ARM Cortex M4, two MPR121 touch controllers for 24 channels of capacititve touch capability, and a pressure sensor to tell the computer how strong the user is blowing. All of this works, and [J.M.] has a few videos showing off the capabilities of his homemade controller. It’s a great piece of work, and there are a few extentions that make this really interesting: there’s the possibility of adding CV out so it can be connected to modular synths, and the addition of accelerometers to the build makes for some very interesting effects.

Check out the video below.

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Laser Cut Cardboard Robot Construction Kit Eases Learning And Play

October 18, 2018 by Donald Papp No comments

It has never been easier to put a microcontroller and other electronics into a simple project, and that has tremendous learning potential. But when it comes to mechanical build elements like enclosures, frames, and connectors, things haven’t quite kept the same pace. It’s easier to source economical servos, motors, and microcontroller boards than it is to arrange for other robot parts that allow for cheap and accessible customization and experimentation.

That’s where [Andy Forest] comes in with the Laser Cut Cardboard Robot Construction Kit, which started at STEAMLabs, a non-profit community makerspace in Toronto. The design makes modular frames, enclosures, and basic hardware out of laser-cut corrugated cardboard. It’s an economical and effective method of creating the mechanical elements needed for creating robots and animatronics while still allowing easy customizing. The sheets have punch-out sections for plastic straws, chopstick axles, SG90 servo motors, and of course, anything that’s missing can be easily added with hot glue or cut out with a knife. In addition to the designs being open sourced, there is also an activity guide for educators that gives visual examples of different ways to use everything.

Cardboard makes a great prototyping material, but what makes the whole project sing is the way the designs allow for easy modification and play while being easy to source and produce.

Sonic Robots Don’t Play Instruments, They Are The Instruments

October 17, 2018 by Donald Papp 7 Comments

[Moritz Simon Geist]’s experiences as both a classically trained musician and a robotics engineer is clearly what makes his Techno Music Robots project so stunningly executed. The robotic electronic music he has created involves no traditional instruments of any kind. Instead, the robots themselves are the instruments, and every sound comes from some kind of physical element.

A motor might smack a bit of metal, a hard drive arm might tap out a rhythm, and odder sounds come from stranger devices. If it’s technological and can make a sound, [Moritz Simon Geist] has probably carefully explored whether it can be turned into one of his Sonic Robots. The video embedded below is an excellent example of his results, which is electronic music without a synthesizer in sight.

We’ve seen robot bands before, and they’re always the product of some amazing work. The Toa Mata Lego Band are small Lego units and Compressorhead play full-sized instruments on stage, but robots that are the instruments is a different direction that still keeps the same physical element to the music.

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These Twenty Projects Won The Musical Instrument Challenge In The Hackaday Prize

October 16, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

The Hackaday Prize is the greatest hardware competition on the planet. It’s the Academy Awards of Open hardware, and over the past few months we’ve challenged makers and artists to create the Next Big Thing. All things must come to an end, though, and last week we wrapped up the final challenge in the Hackaday Prize. The results were fantastic, with over one hundred entries to the Musical Instrument Challenge. Now, we’re ready to announce the winners.

Over the past few months, we’ve been running a series of five challenges, and picking the best twenty projects to come out of these challenges. The Musical Instrument Challenge was the final challenge in The Hackaday Prize, and now we’re happy to announce the winners. These projects have been awarded a $1,000 cash prize, and they’re moving onto the final round where one lucky winner will receive the Grand Prize of $50,000. Here are the winners of the Musical Instrument Challenge, in no particular order: