3D Printing Some Sweet Music

April 21, 2013 by Mike Szczys 29 Comments

3d-printer-music

If you don’t mind ending up with oddly shaped 3D printed parts you can get your printer to sing to you. The exhibit shown above is doing just that. The Lulzbot is being driven specifically to produce a certain frequency of sound with its stepper motors. The results of a few different songs are what’s hanging on the wall to the right. You can hear it printing Bizet’s Carmen in the clip after the break.

[Rickard Dahlstrand] hacked together a Python script capable of parsing a MIDI file and outputting a G-code equivalent that will produce the frequencies and durations necessary to hear the audio on a stepper motor. As we mentioned, he uses a Lulzbot but the script appears to include setting for Cupcake, Thingomatic, Shapercube, and Ultimaker. The parser script as well as the example G-code files for a library of classical music can be downloaded from his repository.

Now if you’re looking for some other crazy CNC music ideas you can’t beat this wineglass music hack.

Continue reading “3D Printing Some Sweet Music” →

Horribly Complicated Electric Guitar Keyboard

April 12, 2013 by Mike Szczys 32 Comments

the-email-gutar

Gutarist, hacker, and mustache enthusiast [David Neevel] brought together way too many pieces of hardware in order to use his electric guitar as a computer keyboard.

So let’s dig into the house of cards he built for the project. It starts off with the guitar which has been fitted with an additional pickup to interface with a Roland GR-33 synthesizer pedal. That outputs a MIDI signal, which many hackers would have connected to the computer and parsed with a simple script. But not [David], he connected it to an Arduino via an optisolator. Well that’s not too ridiculous, right? Don’t you think he’ll just parse the MIDI signals and push them to the computer via the Arduino’s USB port? Wrong! He translates the MIDI signals into combinations for a big relay board which is emulating the key matrix of an old USB keyboard. But as you can see in the demo video after the jump it works quite well.

If you’re more of the drumming sort there’s an electric drum set version of this hack too.

Continue reading “Horribly Complicated Electric Guitar Keyboard” →

MIDI Pedal Project Looks As Good As It Sounds

April 10, 2013 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

organ-pedal-midi-project

[Lee O’Donnell] is showing off his version of a MIDI organ pedal hack. We’ve been seeing a few of these lately. The organ pedals are a great stating point as they’re easy to patch into electronically, and are designed to take a beating from your feet and come out the other side no worse for wear. The build goes beyond one of our favorite MIDI pedal conversions in both features and finish.

An Arduino Nano pulls this project together. It scans the pedals constantly and converts the key presses into MIDI signals. But the design includes this fabulous looking front-end which [Lee] first prototyped in cardboard before cutting and bending his own Aluminum tread plate. A two-row character display provides a menu system, but the buttons themselves act as feedback based on the behavior of the light inside each of them. One example of this is shown early in the demo video after the break. The blue button toggles between polyphonic and monophonic mode with the light fading in and out for the latter.

Continue reading “MIDI Pedal Project Looks As Good As It Sounds” →

Hi-Hat MIDI Controller

March 27, 2013 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

midi-hi-hat-controller

Drumming hackers take note, if you’ve got an extra bass drum pedal it’s cheap and simple to use it as a MIDI controller. This rig was thrown together to supplement a DIG DRUM electric drum set. That piece of equipment has a pedal add-on that didn’t come with it. Turns out all it does is feed a resistance value to the set.

To get this up and running a frame was built from a metal base and acrylic side piece. The acrylic hosts a trimmable potentiometer which connects to an 1/4″ stereo jack right beside it. This facilitates connecting the pedal to the drum set using an audio patch cable. Interface with the pedal is accomplished with a few bits from the hardware store. The axle of the pedal sticks out one side, and is clamped between two washers. The other side of the washer grip the timpot causing it to move when the pedal does.

This hardware is a snap to use with your own MIDI device. We’d suggest giving the HIDUINO package a try.

ASETNIOP Chorded Typing With A Piano Keyboard

March 15, 2013 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

asetniop-chorded-typing-with-a-piano

We don’t know if typing your Facebook updates from a piano keyboard counts as practicing or not. But if you want to give it a try here’s how. [Zach] wrote in to our tips line with his latest ASETNIOP hack which uses a MIDI piano keyboard to touch type on a computer.

Last July was when we first heard about ASETNIOP. It’s a chorded typing system which at the time was aimed at, but not limited to, touch screen devices. This version gives a pretty good idea of how the system actually works. Your fingers and thumbs are each assigned a key and they never move away from it. To type more than just the ten letters, combinations of keys are assigned the rest of the alphabet. You can see the piano example of the system after the break. But better yet would be hooking your own MIDI keyboard up to the computer and trying it in a browser.

Continue reading “ASETNIOP Chorded Typing With A Piano Keyboard” →

Arduino-controlled MIDI Sequencer

February 22, 2013 by Mike Szczys 34 Comments

am808vx3-arduino-synth

[Christian] wrote in to tell us about his third-generation Arduino MIDI sequencer (translated) called the AM808 VX3. He had already laid a strong base for the project in his previous versions. But the user interface was still frustrating at times and that’s where this version comes in. it features a nice clean dashboard like interface, but also includes a configurable virtual interface.

The obvious components seen above include the slider and potentiometer band, as well as the repository of buttons mounted below that. But in the center of the board is a touchpad which [Christian] pulled out of an old Laptop. It interfaces as a PS2 device which makes it pretty simple to use in conjunction with the Arduino. But that’s not the only touch-enabled input device. The rectangle to the right of the touch pad is an LCD screen with a touch overlay. As you can see (and hear) in the clip after the break, the touch screen made it possible for him to rework the controls until they became simple and intuitive.

Continue reading “Arduino-controlled MIDI Sequencer” →

Building A Velocity Sensitive Keyboard

January 29, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

keys

Cheap toy pianos don’t usually have MIDI, and getting a velocity-sensitive keyboard from something out of the toy aisle at Walmart is nearly out of the question. If you’re willing to tear one of these toy pianos apart and build your own control electronics, though, the sky is the limit, as [JenShen] shows us with his home built velocity sensitive keyboard.

Usually, velocity-sensitive keyboards have two buttons underneath each key. By having a microcontroller measure the time difference between when each button is pressed, it’s possible to sense how fast each key was pressed. [JenShen] took the idea of a velocity-sensitive keyboard in another direction and instead used a force sensitive resistor strip, cut up into many pieces to provide velocity and aftertouch data.

[JenShen]’s keyboard adds these resistive buttons to the button matrix he already made. The result is a very inexpensive velocity sensitive keyboard with aftertouch, an impressive feat for an Arduino and only a few components.

You can check out the keyboard in action after the break.

Continue reading “Building A Velocity Sensitive Keyboard” →