A Music Box With A Very Modern Heart

July 27, 2026 by Jenny List 3 Comments

A ballerina music box is a charming ornament, but it remains one that is limited by its mechanism to a very short performance. [ShielaDixon] has one, and decided to make so much more with it.

The music box mechanism is a simple clockwork motor with a comb that’s picked by a drum to make the notes. Her box retains the mechanism to give the ballerina her performance, but replaces the comb with a microcontroller and audio channel. This is no mere MP3 player though, instead it’s a music box in itself. Each note of the comb was sampled, and the board plays them just as the music box would, under instruction from a text file containing the music. The repertoire can now go on for far longer, and contain many more compositions.

We like this hack, for its effectiveness, and for its recreation of the music box rather than simply playing a recording. Meanwhile if you recognise [ShieldDixon] from these pages, we’ve in the past featured another musical project of hers, a MIDI recorder.

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3D Print (and Play!) The Super Mario Tune As A Fidget Toy

April 4, 2025 by Donald Papp 33 Comments

[kida] has a highly innovative set of 3D-printable, musical fidget toys that play classic video game tunes. Of course there’s the classic Super Mario ditty, but there’s loads more. How they work is pretty nifty, and makes great use of a 3D printer’s strengths.

To play the device one uses a finger to drag a tab (or striker) across the top, and as it does so it twangs vertical tines one-by-one. Each tine emits a particular note — defined by how tall the thicker part is — and plays a short tune as a result. Each one plays a preprogrammed melody, with the tempo and timing up to the user. Listen to them in action in the videos embedded just under the page break!

There are some really clever bits to the design. One is that the gadget is made in two halves, which effectively doubles the notes one can fit into the space. Another is that it’s designed so that holding it against something like a tabletop makes it louder because the surface acts like a sounding board. Finally, the design is easily modified so making new tunes is easy. [kida]’s original design has loads of non-videogame tunes (like the Jeopardy! waiting theme) as well as full instructions on making your very own versions.

Fidget toys are a niche all their own when it comes to 3D printed devices. The fidget knife has a satisfying snap action to it, and this printable linear toggle design is practically a fidget toy all on its own.

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All I Want For Mr. Christmas Is Some New Music

January 12, 2024 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

It’s true — you really can find anything (except maybe LEGO) in thrift stores. When [thecowgoesmoo] picked up a Mr. Christmas Symphonium music box one day, they knew they wanted to make it play more than just the standard Christmas and classical fare that ships with the thing.

So they did what any self-respecting hacker would do, and they wrote a MATLAB script that generates new disk silhouette images that they then cut from cardboard with a laser cutter. They also used various other materials like a disposable cutting mat. Really, whatever is lying around that’s stiff enough and able to be cut should work. You know you want to hear Van Halen’s “Jump” coming from a tinkling music box, don’t you? Be sure to check out the video demonstration after the break.

If you don’t want to wait around until a Mr. Christmas lands in your lap, why not make your own hand-cranked music box and accompanying scores?

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Custom Music Box Cylinder Puts A Spin On Romance

May 25, 2021 by Kristina Panos 9 Comments

Music boxes are awesome little mechanical devices. These days, they even make some with slightly more modern tunes, like the Zelda and Star Wars themes. But they don’t have everything, of course — certainly not that one song from that TV series that [RandomPrototypes]’ girlfriend absolutely adores.

But it’s 2021, and there are options for making your own music box. [RandomPrototypes] could have printed the whole thing, but those don’t sound as good with their plastic combs. Then there’s those paper punch ones, but you have to sit there and crank the thing continuously to hear the song. In the end, [RandomPrototypes] mixed methods and made a custom cylinder that’s playable with a standard music box mechanism.

[RandomPrototypes] started by taking the music box apart to measure the cylinder, and then created a software representation of a cylinder that’s designed to pluck the eighteen notes from low to high rather than play a song. Then he used a Python script to turn it in a 3D model. The slicing preview showed a lot of stops and starts and weak points, so [RandomPrototypes] generated the Gcode directly so that it would print in one continuous spiral and be much stronger.

In order to generate a cylinder with the song his girlfriend likes so much, [RandomPrototypes] printed this scale cylinder and used it to record the notes as a single mp3 and make note of the start times of each note. Finally, he built the new score based on the available notes built into the music box comb. If you want to do this yourself, the code is freely available. The hard part will be choosing a music box mechanism, because they tend to come with a single comb that’s designed to play a specific song. You’ll have to figure out which tune has most or all of the notes you need.

If you don’t mind doing the cranking to listen to the tune, then the paper-punched type of music box is going to be much easier. But why do all that punching yourself, when you could build a machine?

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Arduino Music Box Turns Stuffed Animal Into TV Personality

June 11, 2020 by Sven Gregori 1 Comment

Childlike imagination is a wonderful thing. The ability to give life to inanimate objects and to pretend how they’re living their own life is precious, and not for nothing a successful story line in many movies. With the harsh facts or adulthood and reality coming for all of us eventually, it’s nice to see when some people never fully lose that as they get older. Even better when two find each other in life, like [er13k] and his girlfriend, who enjoy to joke about all the mischief their giant dog-shaped plush toy [Tobias] might secretly get into in their absence. The good thing about growing up on the other hand is the advanced technical opportunities at one’s disposal, which gave the imagined personality an actual face, and have it live inside an old CRT screen.

The initial idea was to just build a little music box as a gift, which beeps out [er13k]’s girlfriend’s favorite song with an Arduino on a speaker he salvaged from an old radio. But as things tend to go when you’re on a roll, he decided to make the gift even more personal. The result is still that music box, built in a 3D-printed case with a little piano that lights up the notes it plays, but in addition the Arduino now also displays a cartoon version of [Tobias] through composite video on an old TV. You can see for yourself in the video after the break how he goes through the day gifting flowers and drawings, and ponders about work and alternative career plans — adult problems are clearly universal.

Sure, the music box sound is a bit one-dimensional, but it’s nevertheless a highly thoughtful gift idea that triumphs with a peak personalization factor. If [er13k] ever wants to change the sound though, maybe there’s some inspiration in this drum machine we’ve seen just a few weeks ago, or this pocket sampler.

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Music Box Paper-Punching Machine Settles The Score

November 15, 2019 by Kristina Panos 11 Comments

As soon as [pashiran] laid eyes on his first hand-cranked music box, he knew he was in love. Then, he started punching the holes for his first ditty. As the repetitive stress of punching heated up his arm, his love cooled a bit. Annealed by the ups and downs of this experience, he decided to design a machine that can punch the holes automatically.

Soon, [pashiran] found his people — a community of music boxers that transform MIDI files to DXF format, which creates coordinates for CAD software. In [pashiran]’s music puncher, an Arduino MEGA takes a DXF file and bubble-sorts the jumble of x-coordinates. The MEGA conducts a trio of two stepper motors and DC motor. One stepper pushes the paper through on the x-axis, and the other moves the puncher head back and forth across the paper scroll as the y-axis. The DC motor moves the punch up and down.

Now, paired with [Martin] of [Wintergatan]’s method for chaining music box paper together, [pashiran] can write a prog-rock-length opus without fear of repetitive stress injury. And since he’s published the STL and INO files, now you can, too. Watch it punch and play 250 notes worth of “~~See My Vest”~~ “Be Our Guest” after the break.

There’s more than one way to avoid manually punching all those holes. When [Wintergatan] was wrestling this problem, he inspired the hacker community to create a MIDI-to-laser-cut-stencil solution.

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Ten 3D Printed Gadgets That Just Can’t Stay Still

February 27, 2019 by Tom Nardi No comments

There was a time, not so very long ago, when simply getting a 3D printer to squirt out an object that was roughly the intended shape and size of what the user saw on their computer screen was an accomplishment. But like every other technology, the state of the art has moved forward. Today the printers are better, and the software to drive them is more capable and intuitive. It was this evolution of desktop 3D printing that inspired the recently concluded 3D Printed Gears, Pulleys, and Cams contest. We wanted to see what hackers and makers can pull off with today’s 3D printing tools, and the community rose to the challenge.

Let’s take a look at the top ten spinning, walking, flapping, and cranking 3D printed designs that shook us up:

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