MIDI Controlled Neon

October 11, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 3 Comments

The people who make neon signs are a vibrant community with glass bending and high voltage electronics. There is a need, though, to sequence these neon signs, and it seems like MIDI is the way to do it. That’s what [david] is doing for his entry to the Hackaday Prize, and the results already look great.

The idea for this project is to transmit MIDI data to a controller that activates neon tubes accordingly. As for why [david] chose MIDI over DMX512 or some other protocol, the object here is to sync with music, and if you already have a drum machine sending MIDI out, you might as well just patch into that.

The build uses an Arduino Leonardo with a MIDI shield produced by Olimex. This shield is connected to a neon power supply that has control circuitry to quickly and easily turn neon signs on and off. The end result is a laptop (with the rest of the DJ software) sending a MIDI clock signal to an Akai drum machine. This drum machine outputs MIDI notes to the shield, which is currently set up to control three neon transformers.

The results look great, with flashing skulls synchronized with bleeps and bloops. This, of course, can be expanded to even more MIDI synced neon signs. You can check out a few videos of the build after the break.

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The 3D Printed Guitar

October 10, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

We just wrapped up the Musical Instrument Challenge in the Hackaday Prize, and that means we’re sorting through a ton of inventive electronic musical instruments. For whatever reason we can’t seem to find many non-electronic instruments. Yes, MPCs are cool, but so are strings and vibrating columns of air. That’s what makes this entry special: it’s a 3D printed physical guitar. But it’s also got a hexaphonic pickup, there are lights in the fretboard, and it talks to a computer for PureData processing.

First, the construction of this guitar. It’s mostly 3D printed, with the ‘frame’ of the body made in a Creality 3D printer. It’s a bolt-on neck with a telecaster body, but the core of this guitar — where the pickups and bridge attach — are made out of aluminum extrusion. Another piece of aluminum extrusion runs down the neck, which is clad in a 3D-printed ‘back’ that looks ‘comfortable enough’. The headstock is bolted onto the end of this neck, and it seems reasonably tolerant of having a hundred pounds or so of strings pulling on it. The bridge is also 3D printed, with the saddles integrated into the print. Conventional wisdom says this would sound terrible, but nylon saddles were a thing back in the day, so we’re just going to roll with it.

The electronics are where this project really shines. The pickup is a salvaged Roland GK3 hexaphonic deal, with six outputs for each string. This is sent into a Teensy with an audio path for each individual string. Audio processing happens in the guitar, and latency is under five milliseconds, which is quick enough to not be a terrible distraction.

Except for synths and drum machines and computers, the last fifty or so years of technological progress hasn’t really made it to the world of musical instruments. Guitarists, especially, are technophobes who hate everything invented after 1963. While the neck of [Frank]’s ElektroCaster probably doesn’t feel great, this is a really interesting instrument and a great entry to the Hackaday Prize.

A Better Charger For Your Coin Cell Batteries

October 9, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

Rechargeable coin cell batteries are great for all your small projects. They look exactly like regular coin-cell batteries, but in a shocking turn of events you can recharge these little guys. They can put out a reasonable amount of current, and they’re small. Just what you need for your Arduino smart watch, or whatever else the kids are doing these days.

But if these batteries are rechargeable, you need a charger. That’s where [Jon]’s entry for the Hackaday Prize comes in handy. It’s a small, cheap charger for LIR2032 and other rechargeable batteries comes in. It’s barely larger than the battery itself, and it plugs right into a USB port. How this isn’t a product already, we’ll never know.

The circuit on this coin cell charger is built from an MCP73831, a nice single cell, lithium ion and lithium polymer charge management controller. In the standard, ‘I only need to read the first page of the datasheet’ configuration, this chip can put 500 mA into a battery. Standard rechargeable coin cells only have a capacity of 40 mAh, so you’ve got plenty of headroom at 1C.

The total cost for this project was under $8 for three boards, and a BOM cost of $2 for one. That’s fourteen bucks for three of them, if you know how to solder, compared to a standard, off-the-shelf charger for about $20. Building this is cheaper than buying the equivalent product. It’s unbelievable, but true.

The Incredible Judges Of The Hackaday Prize

October 8, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

The last challenge of The Hackaday Prize has just ended. Over the past few months, we’ve gotten a sneak peek at over a thousand amazing projects, from Open Hardware to Human Computer Interfaces. This is a contest, though, and to decide the winner, we’re tapping some of the greats in the hardware world to judge these astonishing projects.

Below are just a preview of the judges in this year’s Hackaday Prize. In the next few weeks, we’ll be sending the judging sheets out to them, tallying the results, and in just under a month we’ll be announcing the winners of the Hackaday Prize at the Hackaday Superconference in Pasadena. This is not an event to be missed — not only are we going to hear some fantastic technical talks from the hardware greats, but we’re also going to see who will walk away with the Grand Prize of $50,000.

Kipp Bradford

Kipp Bradford is a biomedical engineer and Research Scientist at the MIT Media Lab. His work focuses on reinventing cool. He is a leader in the maker movement and has founded a variety of start-ups. He was a presenter at the Hackaday Superconference last year where he talked about the importance of building boring projects. It’s a great talk about Devices for Controlling Climates, or quite simply, an HVAC system. This isn’t a flashy project by any means — refrigeration has been around for a hundred years, and air conditioning has been common for fifty. Still, there’s a lot to learn about building infrastructure, and given the ubitquity of climate control systems, small efficiency gains can add up to a huge impact.

Madison Maxey

Madison Maxey is a internationally renowned technologist and multidisciplinary creative. Maxey has pioneered work in bringing flexible, robust circuitry to scale as Founder of LOOMIA, a technology that implants coats and jackets with soft, flexible circuitry that can heat, light, sense and track data. If you’re looking for wearable technology that isn’t made of copper and Kapton, look no further. LOOMIA has been featured by Business Insider, Forbes, and Huffington Post. This little bit of hardware can serve as a heater, keeping you warm, or as lighting to illuminate the headliner of a car or keep you visible at night. Maddy is a member of Forbes 30 under 30, a Thiel Fellow, and a Lord and Taylor Rose Award recipient.

Mark Rober

Mark Rober is a former NASA engineer, an inventor, and current YouTuber with nearly three million subscribers, all of them interested in science and engineering. He’s been featured on Hackaday numerous times for engineering the perfect throw for skipping a rock across a lake, filling a hot tub with sand, then swimming in it, building a dart board that always catches your dart for the perfect bullseye, and building the world’s largest Super Soaker (yes, it’s the classic, original Super Soaker). His work has been featured in dozens of publications around the Internet. Mark is full of awesome ideas and through his YouTube channel is able to explain science and engineering clearly to millions of people around the globe.

Colin Furze

Colin Furze is a mad Englishman in a shed who was formerly a plumber and now creates amazing inventions and incredible vehicles. His YouTube channel has over five million subscribers and his videos have been viewed over six hundred million times. He’s built a real hoverbike which must someday be taken to the forest moon of Endor, the world’s fastest bumper car that is also remarkably unsafe to actually use as a bumper car, and a knife that toasts bread as you slice it. But of course his most impressive achievement is gigantic pulse jet that was heard across the English Channel. And all of this without scorching his safety tie.

These are just four of the amazingly accomplished judges we have lined up to determine the winner of this year’s Hackaday Prize. The winner will be announced on November 3rd at the Hackaday Superconference. There are still tickets available, and you really want to be there if you can make it. Still, we’re going to be live streaming everything, including the prize ceremony, where one team will walk away with the grand prize of $50,000. It’s not an event to miss.

Towards Open Biomedical Imaging

October 7, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

We live in a world where anyone can build a CT machine. Yes, anyone. It’s made of laser-cut plywood and it looks like a Stargate. Anyone can build an MRI machine. Of course, these machines aren’t really good enough for medical diagnosis, or good enough to image anything that’s alive for that matter. This project for the Hackaday Prize is something else, though. It’s biomedical imaging put into a package that is just good enough to image your lungs while they’re still in your body.

The idea behind Spectra is to attach two electrodes to the body (a chest cavity, your gut, or a simulator that’s basically a towel wrapped around the inside of a beaker). One of these electrodes emits an AC signal, and the second electrode measures the impedance and phase. Next, move the electrodes and measure again. Do this a few times, and you’ll be able to perform a tomographic reconstruction of the inside of a chest cavity (or beaker simulator).

Hardware-wise, Spectra uses more than two electrodes, thirty-two on the biggest version built so far. All of these electrodes are hooked up to a PCB that’s just under 2″ square, and everything is measured with 16-bit resolution at a 160 kSPS sample rate. To image something, each electrode sends out an AC current. Different tissues have different resistances, and the path taken through the body will have different outputs. After doing this through many electrodes, you can use the usual tomographic techniques to ‘see’ inside the body.

This is a remarkably inexpensive way to image the interior of the human body. No, it doesn’t have the same resolution as an MRI, but then again you don’t need superconducting electromagnets either. We’re really excited to see where this project will go, and we’re looking forward to the inevitable project updates.

Challenge Your Perception Of Reality With Emotional Sunglasses

October 6, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 5 Comments

The Peril-Sensitive sunglasses of Hitchhiker’s Guide fame directly affect the user’s response to a stimulus, turning completely opaque in response to danger. That’s a great idea, but what if sunglasses could affect your emotions? That’s what the EmotiGlass project in this year’s Hackaday Prize is doing. It’s a concept that allows a computer to change the user’s emotional perception of reality.

The key idea behind the EmotiGlass comes from a paper published by a researcher at the University of London just this year. Apparently, your emotional reaction to an image can be controlled depending on the point in time during your heartbeat cycle the image is presented. For example, researchers found the perception of pain depended on the point in the cardiac cycle the stimulus was delivered.

In an effort to test out this hypothesis with some Open Source hardware, [David Prutchi] and [Jason Meyers] created a pair of sunglasses with liquid crystal lenses that can either be clear or opaque. With the addition of ECG sensors to detect the cardiac cycle and a microcontroller to tie everything together, you get a device that is the emotional equivalent of Peril-Sensitive sunglass.

This is a great project that won $1000 for making it to the finals of the Hackaday Prize, and we’re proud to have this project in the running for the Grand Prize of $50,000 USD.

This Is Your Last Chance To Enter The Hackaday Prize

October 5, 2018 by Brian Benchoff No comments

For the last seven months, we’ve been running the world’s greatest hardware competition. The Hackaday Prize is the Academy Awards of Open Hardware, and a competition where thousands of hardware hackers compete to build a better future. The results have already been phenomenal, but all good things must come to an end: we’re wrapping up the last challenge in the Hackaday Prize, after which the finalists of the five rounds will move on, with the ultimate winner being announced next month at the Hackaday Superconference.

We’re in the final hours of the Musical Instrument Challenge, where we’re asking everyone to build the next evolution of modern music instrumentation. We’re looking for the next electric guitar, theremin, synthesizer, violin, or an MPC. What we’ve seen so far is, quite simply, amazing. One of the finalists from the five challenges in this year’s Hackaday Prize will win $50,000 USD, but twenty projects from the Musical Instrument Challenge will each win $1000. We’ll be figuring out those winners on Monday, where they’ll move onto the final round, refereed by our fantastic judges.

It’s still not too late to get in on the action in this year’s Musical Instrument Challenge. We’re looking for the best musical projects out there, but time is of the essence. This round closes on October 8th at 07:00 PDT. There’s still time, though, so start your entry now.

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