Open-Source Analytical Balance Pits Gravity Against Electromagnetism

December 26, 2019 by Jenny List 19 Comments

As the open-source movement has brought its influence to more and more fields, we’ve seen an astonishing variety of things once only available at significant expense become accessible to anyone with access to the tools required to create them. One such arena is that of scientific instrumentation, and though we have seen many interesting developments there has been one which has so far evaded us. An analytical balance, a very specialised weighing machine designed to measure the tiniest of masses, remains available only as a new unit costing a fortune, or as a second-hand one with uncertain history and possible contamination. Fortunately, friend of Hackaday [Zach Fredin] is on the case, and as part of one of his MIT courses he chose to create an open-source analytical balance.

The write-up is interspersed with his course notes as he learns a series of fabrication techniques, but in addition to the milled Delrin finished model he treats us to his prototype and gives us an explanation of how these instruments work. It’s a technique that’s rather different to a traditional weighing machine: instead of measuring deformation of a spring in some way it produces a force from an electromagnet to oppose that exerted by gravity on the mass to be measured, and quantifies how much electrical energy is required to do that. The mechanism incorporates feedback through a vane and an optical sensor, which he admits he’s not yet had time to set up properly.

It’s an interesting project not least because it exposes some of the inner workings of an analytical balance, and we look forward to his completing it. If this whet your appetite for the topic it’s worth also looking at [Ben Krasnow’s] video of a balance made using a moving coil meter for an explanation of the technique.

When Toothbrushes, Typewriters, And Credit Card Machines Form A Band

August 23, 2019 by Roger Cheng 5 Comments

Many everyday objects make some noise as a side effect of their day job, so some of us would hack them into music instruments that can play a song or two. It’s fun, but it’s been done. YouTube channel [Device Orchestra] goes far beyond a device buzzing out a tune – they are full fledged singing (and dancing!) performers. Watch their cover of Take on Me embedded after the break, and if you liked it head over to the channel for more.

The buzz of a stepper motor, easily commanded for varying speeds, is the easiest entry point into this world of mechanical music. They used to be quite common in computer equipment such as floppy drives, hard drives, and flatbed scanners. As those pieces of equipment become outdated and sold for cheap, it became feasible to assemble a large number of them with the Floppotron being something of a high-water mark.

After one of our more recent mentions in this area, when the mechanical sound of a floppy drive is used in the score of a motion picture, there were definite signs of fatigue in the feedback. “We’re ready for something new” so here we are without any computer peripherals! [Device Orchestra] features percussion by typewriters, vocals by toothbrushes, and choreography by credit card machines with the help of kitchen utensils. Coordinating them all is an impressive pile of wires acting as stage manager.

We love to see creativity with affordable everyday objects like this. But we also see the same concept done with equipment on the opposite end of the price spectrum such as a soothing performance of Bach using the coils of a MRI machine.

[Thanks @Bornach1 for the tip]

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Forming Fipples And Accompanying Accoutrements

August 6, 2019 by Brian McEvoy 7 Comments

[Dr. Suess] created memorable books with minimal words and bright artwork. He inspired children and adults alike, and one of them, [Len], grew up to create wind instruments for the Bellowphone channel on YouTube. Behind the whimsy of his creations is significant engineering, and this time, we get to see the construction of a fipple. The video is also shown after the break. Even though fipple sounds like a word [Dr. Suess] would have coined, it is a legitimate musical term that means a whistle-like mouthpiece. In this case, it blows air across glass jars to create the sound for [Len]’s bottle organ. Check out the second video below for a performance from The Magic Flute.

[Len] uses clear rigid PVC for the fipples and a custom forming die to shape them while they are soft. The rest is precision hand-tool work with a razor saw, hand file, and wet-dry sandpaper. Once complete, the fipple looks like any musical instrument part produced by exacting construction techniques. Making a mouthpiece is one thing, but if it is not directed correctly it will not make any sound, so we also learn how to turn steel strapping into an organ bottle assembly. If you add some tubing and rubber squeeze balls, you can make your own instrument.

Part of the reason the Bellowphone channel exists is that [Len] found a lot of support in the pipe organ community that showed him the secret inner workings of their livelihood and now is his chance to share that enthusiasm with the maker community.

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Creating A Sonic Landscape With Glitching CD Player

May 27, 2019 by Bryan Cockfield 5 Comments

CDs were a great advancement in audio quality when they were first put on the market. There’s no vinyl-style degradation of the medium if it’s played over and over, and there’s no risk of turning them into a giant pile of ribbon while rewinding like a cassette tape. The one downside was that if you were to take them on the move you needed special hardware and software to prevent the inevitable skipping. If you look at the skipping not as a downside, though, but as a way to produce interesting music, you might end up with a pretty unique piece of hardware.

[Dmitry] is known for his interesting art installations, and the latest one uses parts from three 1988 Sony D2 CD players that have been reassembled in order to take advantage of a skipping and glitching CD. The modified equipment is able to play during pause or rewind thanks to a processor modification, and can also change the rotational speed of the disc. There are other pieces of hardware included for more fine control of glitching and skipping of the audio being read off of the CD.

The new device functions as a working musical instrument, although [Dmitry] says that it is more useful for deconstructing the information stored on the disc, and exploring the medium itself. Of course if you have enough motivation, you can find sounds from almost anywhere on (or in) the planet too.

A Scratch Instrument For Ants

December 20, 2018 by Bryan Cockfield 2 Comments

If you think that this scratch instrument looks as though it should be at least… three times larger in order to be useful, you’d be wrong. This mighty pocket-sized instrument can really get the club hopping despite its diminuitive size. Despite that, the quality of the build as well as its use of off-the-shelf components for almost every part means that if you need a small, portable turntable there’s finally one you can build on your own.

[rasteri] built the SC1000 digital scratch instrument as a member of the portabilist scene, focusing on downsizing the equipment needed for a proper DJ setup. This instrument uses as Olimex A13-SOM-256 system-on-module, an ARM microprocessor, and can use a USB stick in order to load beats to the system. The scratch wheel itself uses a magnetic rotary encoder to sense position, and the slider is miniaturized as well.

If you want to learn to scratch good and learn to do other things good too, there’s a demo below showing a demonstration of the instrument, as well as a how-to video on the project page. All of the build files and software are open-source, so it won’t be too difficult to get one for yourself as long as you have some experience printing PCBs. If you need the rest of the equipment for a DJ booth, of course that’s also something you can build.

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Looks Like A Glove, Plays Like A Musical Instrument

October 25, 2018 by Donald Papp 8 Comments

The GePS is a musical project that shows how important integration work is when it comes to gesture controls. Creators [Cedric Spindler] and [Frederic Robinson] demonstrate how the output of a hand-mounted IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) and magnetometer can be used to turn motion, gestures, and quick snap movements into musical output. The GePS is designed to have enough repeatability and low enough latency that feedback is practically immediate. As a result, it can be used and played like any other musical instrument that creates sound from physical movements in a predictable way. It’s not unlike a Theremin in that way, but much more configurable.

To do this, [Cedric] and [Frederic] made GePS from a CurieNano board (based on Intel’s Curie, which also has the IMU on-board) and an XBee radio for a wireless connection to software running on a computer, from which the sounds are played. The device’s sensitivity and low lag means that even small movements can be reliably captured, meaning that the kind of fluid and complex movements that hands do every day can be used as the basis for playing sounds with immediate feedback. In a very real sense, the glove-based GePS is an experimental kind of new instrument, which makes it a fascinating contender for the Musical Instrument Challenge portion of the 2018 Hackaday Prize.

Superdeep Borehole Samples Create Non-boring Music

October 19, 2018 by Bryan Cockfield 14 Comments

In the 1970s, the Soviet Union decided to dig a hole for science. Not just any hole, the Kola Superdeep Borehole reached a depth of over 12 kilometers, the deepest at the time and the second deepest today by just a few meters. Since this was one of the few holes dug this deep that wasn’t being drilled for oil, the project was eventually abandoned. [Dmitry] was able to find some core samples from the project though, and he headed up to the ruins of the scientific site with his latest project which produces musical sounds from the core samples.

The musical instrument uses punched tape, found at the borehole site, as a sort of “seed” for generating the sounds. Around the outside of the device are five miniature drilling rigs, each holding a piece of a core sample from the hole. The instrument uses the punched tape in order to control the drilling rigs, and the sound that is created is processed by the instrument and amplified, which creates some interesting and rather spooky sounds. The whole thing is controlled by an Arduino Mega.

Not only does the project make interesting sounds from a historically and scientifically significant research station and its findings, but the project has a unique and clean design that really fits its environment at the abandoned facility. The other interesting thing about this project is that, if you want to make the trek, anyone can go explore the building and see the hole for themselves. If you’re wondering about the tools that could be used to make a hole like this, take a look at this boring project.

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