build

18 Articles

A black guitar with red rings on its body is held by a man in a black shirt. Text pointing to the red ring of guitar picks says, "This spins."

1000 Picks Make For A Weird Guitar

August 6, 2024 by 1 Comment

String instruments have a long history in civilization, helping humans make more complex and beautiful music. We wonder what our forebears would think of this guitar strummed with 1000 picks?

[Mattias Krantz] wondered what the best number of picks was to play guitar and took the experiment to its illogical extreme. Starting with zero picks and working up through various 3D printed multi-picks he tests all the feasible combinations of handheld picks.

After that, he switches gears to a fishing rod-actuated system of several picks in a ring. Not pleased with the initial acoustics of the picks in this system, he switched to printing his picks in a more flexible filament to better approximate the characteristics of the human thumb. Finally, he takes us to the undiscovered country of a spinning ring of 1000 picks strumming the underside of the strings and the… interesting acoustic result. As many pointed out in the comments, this blurs the line between a guitar and a hurdy gurdy.

If you want more melodic musical mischief, perhaps try this optical guitar pickup, a $30 guitar build, or get fancy with a 3D printed violin?

Continue reading “1000 Picks Make For A Weird Guitar” →

Building A Giant Boardgame Isn’t Easy

April 19, 2024 by 8 Comments

[Stevenson Streeper] is a maker, and was recently charged with a serious mission. He had to prototype, design, and build a board game. A software-controlled board game, that is, and one that was 400 square-feet in size. As you might imagine, this ended up being a tall order, and he’s been kind enough to share his tale on his blog.

His client’s idea was for a giant interactive game board akin to the glowing disco floors of old. It had to play a game approximating the rules of “The Floor Is Lava.” It had to handle up to 20 players at a time, too.

[Stevenson] runs a company that delivers “Activations”—basically big showpieces for customers willing to pay. This wasn’t his first attempt at building an immersive attraction, but it was a big job, and a challenging one at that. He explains the difficulties that came about from a limited crew, limited timeline, and a number of difficult missteps. Hurdles included surprise unusable off-the-shelf hardware and the difficulty of hand-sanding 144 tiles of polycarbonate. One weeps for the project’s plight early on – if only the AliExpress tiles were documented.

He may have bitten off more than he could chew, and yet—the project was finished and to a decent degree of functionality success. That’s to be applauded, and [Stevenson] learned a ton along the way. Big projects can be daunting and can put you in a bind. As this story demonstrates, though, perseverance often gets you somewhere okay in the end. Video after the break.

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$30 Guitar Build Shows What You Can Do With Amazon Parts

December 22, 2023 by 20 Comments

Most guitarists buy their axes fully assembled from big names like Fender, Gibson, and… maybe Yamaha? Sure. But there are a dedicated set that relish in mixing and matching parts and even building and assembling their own instruments. [Danny Lewis] decided to see what he could do with the cheapest guitar parts from Amazon and a body of his own design, and he put together something pretty passable for just $30.

The wood for the body was cut on a bandsaw, and was essentially free scrap sourced from old furniture. [Danny] went for an unconventional design using a roughly Telecaster outline and large cutouts either side of the bridge. The neck was free, by virtue of being an old Harmony neck sourced off Craigslist. We’d have preferred to see what could be done with a cheap Amazon neck, but it nonetheless fits the vibe of the build.

The guitar then received a $9.99 pickup and controls, an $8.80 solidtail bridge, and $11 tuning machines for the headstock. Strung up, it actually sounds passable. We’d want to throw it on a proper amp and give the whole thing a setup before fully assessing it, but hey, for $30, it’s hard to go wrong.

We do love some hacky guitars around here; we’ve even featured some with surprise effects gear built into the bodies. Video after the break.

Continue reading “$30 Guitar Build Shows What You Can Do With Amazon Parts” →

Quake 2 Ported To Apple Watch

September 6, 2023 by No comments

DOOM always seems to spontaneously appear on any new device the day it’s released. From printers to industrial robots to pregnancy tests, it always makes its way on anything with an integrated circuit and a screen. But that’s not the only 90s video game with a cult following and and ability to run on hardware never intended for gaming. The early Quake games are still remarkably popular, and the second installment of this series was recently brought to the Apple Watch thanks to [ByteOverlord].

Building this classic for the Apple Watch requires using the original Quake files and some work with Xcode to get a package together that will run on the wrist-bound computer. There are a few other minimum system requirements to meet as well, but with all of that out of the way the latest release runs fairly well on this small watch. The controls have been significantly modified to use the Apple’s touch screen and digital crown instead of any peripherals, and as a result it’s not likely you’d win any matches if it was possible to cross-play with PC users with a setup like this, but it’s definitely playable although still missing a few features compared to the PC version.

This actually isn’t the first Quake game to be ported to the Apple Watch, either. The first version of Quake ran on this device thanks to [MyOwnClone]’s efforts a little over a year ago. It’s also not the first time we’ve seen Quake running on unusual Apple hardware, either. Take a look at this project which uses one of the early iPods to play this game, along with the scroll wheel for a one-of-a-kind controller.

Thanks to [Joni] for the tip!

This Custom Workbench Will Make You Flip

June 26, 2022 by 26 Comments

In a recent video, [SomeSkillStudio] created a tidy tool storage system for their slim garage workbench. We have seen the “five knuckle” 270 degree hinges used here before and knew they’d enable some cool hacks. Here you’ll see how he puts this unique type of hardware to work building a densely packed work surface. For anyone who’s set up shop in a garage that’s somehow also supposed to still regularly host vehicles, you’ll know how important it is to have a place to put everything away and make it easy to do so.

The video has several great tips on making sure everything fits together, something key for anyone reproducing this with their own tool collection. If you have even less space, we have some great past workshop builds from portable, to tiny, to elaborate. Even if you’ve already established a place to work, we have tips on organizing your shop, giving each tool a home in a shadow board or across an infinite grid. Clearly, making a work space is one of our favorite kinds of projects.

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Portrait Of A Digital Weapon

April 15, 2021 by 3 Comments

Over the years, artists have been creating art depicting weapons of mass destruction, war and human conflict. But the weapons of war, and the theatres of operation are changing in the 21st century. The outcome of many future conflicts will surely depend on digital warriors, huddled over their computer screens, punching on their keyboards and maneuvering joysticks, or using devious methods to infect computers to disable or destroy infrastructure. How does an artist give physical form to an unseen, virtual digital weapon? That is the question which inspired [Mac Pierce] to create his latest Portrait of a Digital Weapon.

[Mac]’s art piece is a physical depiction of a virtual digital weapon, a nation-state cyber attack. When activated, this piece displays the full code of the Stuxnet virus, a worm that partially disabled Iran’s nuclear fuel production facility at Natanz around 2008. Continue reading “Portrait Of A Digital Weapon” →

Ask Hackaday: What’s Your Favourite Build Tool? Can Make Ever Be Usurped?

March 11, 2021 by 48 Comments

What do you do whilst your code’s compiling? Pull up Hackaday? Check Elon Musk’s net worth? Research the price of a faster PC? Or do you wonder what’s taking so long, and decide to switch out your build system?

Clamber aboard for some musings on Makefiles, monopolies, and the magic of Ninja. I want to hear what you use to build your software. Should we still be using make in 2021? Jump into the fray in the comments.

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