Typing With A MIDI Drum Set

October 25, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

[Autuin] picked up the drums at the age of 18, but by his own admission he’s no [Bonzo], [Buddy Rich] or [Ringo]. Practicing always seems to fall off the end of his to-do list, and there really is only one way to Carnegie Hall. One thing [Autuin] is really fast at is typing, so he figured he could improve his drumming skills by banging a few paragraphs out.

The core of the build is a Yamaha DTX drum module, a MIDI-to-USB adapter, and little light coding. Basically, [Autuin] made a chorded keyboard out of his drums; by hitting one (or two, or three) drum heads at the same time, he can type characters in Open Office.

For going outside the comfort zone of a steady rock beat, we’re thinking [Autuin]’s build might just be useful. He’ll be displaying his Keyboard/Drum mashup at Vancouver’s East Side Culture Crawl alongside a horrible device of artistic merit. If you promise not to break anything, drop in on him in a few weeks.

Vidia after the break.

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LED Illuminated Isomorphic Keyboard Looks As Good As It Sounds

October 5, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 15 Comments

Unlike the traditional ebony and ivory found on pianos, isomorphic keyboards arrange buttons on a grid. This makes every chord the same shape, and to transpose a piece it’s simply a matter of moving your fingers a few places to the left or right. [Brett Park] sent in an isomorphic keyboard he built loaded up with LEDs, and we’re thinking it the perfect instrument for musicians looking to move up from playing their MacBook.

The body of [Brett]’s keyboard is made out of a sheet of acrylic. After drilling 64 holes for each of the clear arcade buttons, [Brett] bent the sides of his hexagonal keyboard into a very sturdy-looking enclosure.

On the hardware side, [Brett] used a 64 button Arduino shield and a Sparkfun MIDI shield. The RGB LEDs behind each button are controlled via MIDI sysex messages generated outside the instrument, making it perfect for a little bit of visual feedback from whatever soft synth you desire.

In the videos after the break, you can check out the light patterns in action along with one of [Brett]’s improvs. Notice how all the chords are the same shape, and changing the key only requires [Brett] to move his hands slightly to the side.

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MIDI Man-in-the-middle Hack Lets You Add Pedal To The Mix

September 26, 2012 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

[Sebastian] has a friend who would like to use a pedal with his MIDI setup, but his keyboard doesn’t support one. Some might interpret that as a sign you need to buy a new keyboard. But [Sebastian] has already done a lot of work with the MIDI protocol. He knew it should be possible to create a MIDI pass-through which adds support for a pedal.

You can see the two MIDI cables connected to the box above. One is the input from the keyboard, the other is the output to the synthesizer. There is also a jack for a pedal input to the left. The chip inside intercepts each packet, rolling in values based from the pedal input and passing on the altered packets to the synthesizer. As you can hear in the video after the break, this works like a charm.

Catch more of [Sebastian’s] midi work by following his keyboard sensor replacement projects.

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Using A Raspberry Pi As Your Travel Computer

September 11, 2012 by Mike Szczys 29 Comments

Do you think you could travel for the entire summer and leave your laptop at home? [Gef] did just that. With the help of his Kindle he used a Raspberry Pi as his travel computer. This was an easy association to think up, since he planned to bring the Kindle along as his reading material anyway. All it was going to take was some creative hacking to get it working as a display for the single-board computer.

The Kindle is merely connecting to the Raspberry Pi through a terminal emulator. This happens via USB, and requires that you Jailbreak the kindle and install a package called USBnetwork. The problem with the technique is that you’re going to go crazy trying to use the tiny keyboard that is built into the eBook reader. [Gef] decided to take a USB keyboard along with him, but how is he going to use it to control the terminal screen on the Kindle? The answer is the ‘screen’ application. We’ve used it a lot to keep programs running on a machine after we’ve exited from an SSH session. It turns out it can also be used to host multiple users on the same terminal session. Pretty neat!

[via Make]

Typewriter Is USB Keyboard, Also Awesome

September 11, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 15 Comments

If you’re a brooding author putting the finishing touches on the next Great American Novel™ while sipping a latte in Starbucks, a MacBook is far too common to impress uncultured proles guzzling caramel macchiatos. No, to impress the next [Joyce] or [T. S. Eliot] sitting at the table next to you, you’ll need something much more hip, like a kit to turn a typewriter into a USB keyboard.

This kit to turn an old Underwood into a USB keyboard comes from the drawing board of [Jack Zylkin], member of Philly hackerspace Hive 76. [Jack] managed to make the process of turning an old typewriter into a keyboard a relatively painless process.

[Jack] created a sensor board loaded up with 74HC595 shift registers that easily mounts to the frame of just about any typewriter. When a key on the typewriter is struck, the mechanical levers strike metal strips soldered to the sensor board. An ATMega microcontroller records these keypresses and sends them over a USB port just like any other USB keyboard.

Modifying a typewriter into a USB keyboard is one of those projects we’d dread; you’d think there would be far too much futzing about with a lot of small electrical contacts and dirty mechanical devices. [Jack] actually managed to put together a very nice kit to turn a typewriter into a keyboard here.

You can pick up a kit over at [Jack]’s etsy store, but doing the same thing with a bit of perf board isn’t out of the question. Awesome video after the break.

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ProtoSynth, The Prototyping Synthesizer

September 6, 2012 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

This project isn’t really a prototype, but a tool for prototyping. [Tymkrs] came up with a unique way to build this synthesizer prototyping tool. They actually patched into the underside of the breadboards in order to keep all of the permanent bits nice and tidy.

In the clip after the break you’ll see all of the build photos that lead up to this point. After cutting out and assembling the wooden pieces for the case they grab a soldering iron and get to work. Two octaves worth of keys were pulled out of an electric keyboard. Ribbon cable is soldered onto each key’s electrical connection, with an SIL pin header as a connector. This mates with another ribbon cable with a SIL socket on one end, and an IDC connector on the other. The real trick is getting that IDC connected to the breadboard. They cut back the adhesive tape on the underside of the board and soldered a surface mount pin header onto it. This way the inputs from the keys, as well as a few 1/4″ jacks from the back of the case are always available in a tidy way on the breadboards. The video goes on to show preliminary synthesizer work on the device.

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Turning A Keyboard Into A Computer With A Raspberry Pi

August 14, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 28 Comments

Only 80s kids will get this: remember when computers had built-in keyboards, like the Apple II line, or the Commodore 64? That’s a form factor duplicated by case modders many times over the years, but [preamp]’s project is the first time its been done using a Raspi (German, Google translation).

For his build, [preamp] used what he considers the best keyboard in the world, the Cherry G80-3000. Except for the HDMI port, just about every plug was moved to the back side of the keyboard with the help of an Ethernet jack, a USB hub, and RCA jack. Audio is missing, but for an extremely portable system [preamp]’s RaspCherry Pi is at the top of its class.

We were wondering when someone would shove a Raspi into a keyboard, and we couldn’t be happier that [preamp] chose a Cherry keyboard for his build; they’re wonderful input devices second only to the 8 pound behemeoth used to write this post.