Antique Phone Provides A Soundtrack Perfect For Restoring Old Cars

March 5, 2012 by Mike Nathan 8 Comments

crank-phone-music

[Simon] is in the middle of restoring/building himself an Austin 7 Special out in his garage, and like most tinkerers, found that music helps to move the process along. He happened to have an old Bakelite generator phone out in the garage as well, and figured that he might as well have it do something other than simply hang on the wall.

Playing music from the 1930 seemed like a fitting enough task, so he picked up an Adafruit Waveshield and spent some time wiring it up to the old telephone. His new radio works simply enough, piping .wav files through the handset, provided someone has cranked the phone’s generator recently.

While cranking the generator is required to play music, the Arduino is actually powered off a pair of AA batteries. The cranking is all cosmetic, but he did program the Arduino to slow the music down every once in awhile, requiring that the generator be turned to get things back up to speed.

It really is a neat way to repurpose the old phone, and we like the fact that [Simon] did not gut it to put this project together.

Continue reading to see a short video of his new music player in action.

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The PANIC Button Saves You From Bad Music

February 19, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 15 Comments

Having a communal music collection being played on random can be really fun. You experience new music and get to hear old favorites. However, not everyone shares the same taste. Sometimes, you absolutely need to just skip the song coming on, for the sake of everyone involved. That was how the Panic button was born.

Starting with a joke panic button that would play an alarm sound, they promptly tore the guts out. They inserted a minimus board, which has an AT90USB162 its brain, and includes onboard USB hardware. When you slap the panic button, it emulates the key press that goes to the next track, thereby saving everyone from whatever monstrosity was threatening their ear drums.

Ball-in-maze Game Shows Creativity And Classic 8-bit Sound

January 19, 2012 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

[M. Eric Carr] built this a long time ago as his Senior Project for EET480. It’s an electronic version of the ball-in-maze game. We’ve embedded this video after the break for your convenience.

The game has just one input; an accelerometer. If you’re having trouble visualizing the game, it works the same as this Android-based version, but replaces the physical maze and marble with a virtual maze on the graphic LCD screen. This has huge implications. Instead of just recreating the maze on the screen, [Eric] designed a multi-screen world, complete with warp blocks, which adds difficulty to finding a solution. It also means that multiple different mazes can be played if you get tired of playing the same level.

This game also features music. A separate PIC microcontroller uses PWM to push out the 8-bit sound heard in the video. From the YouTube comments we learned that [Eric] didn’t write the music himself, but we still appreciate the playback quality he achieves with his hardware.

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Sound-reactive EL Wire Box Makes Gift Giving Awesome

January 15, 2012 by Mike Nathan 5 Comments

sound-reactive-el-wire-display

[Jonathan Thomson] was ruminating on EL wire displays and decided that most he has seen are boring, static fixtures or installations that simply flash EL wire on and off at a fixed rate. He thought that EL wire has far more potential than that, and set off to build something more exciting. Using a graphic equalizer T-shirt, with which we’re sure you are familiar, he put together a slick, sound-reactive EL wire display.

He started off by removing the EL panel and inverter from the aforementioned T-shirt, separating the display into two pieces. He set aside the panel and focused on wiring up the inverter’s ribbon cable to a set of EL wire strands he picked up for the project. Once he had everything hooked up, he put a design together on a cardboard box, which he intended to use for wrapping Christmas presents. With the holiday behind him, [Jonathan] broke down his original display and constructed another to offer up some fun birthday wishes.

While the EL inverter was originally built to display sounds detected by an onboard mic, [Jonathan] added a 3.5” stereo jack to his so that he can feed audio directly into the display using an MP3 player.

Continue reading to see the EL display in action, and be sure to check out his writeup if you are looking to spice up your gift giving this year.

Continue reading “Sound-reactive EL Wire Box Makes Gift Giving Awesome” →

The GATARI “2600” Musical Instrument

January 2, 2012 by Jeremy Cook 14 Comments

So do you have an Atari 2600 laying around collecting dust? Perhaps you’d like to have a musical instrument to take up the time that you would spend playing video games if you had a modern console. Well, look no further than the GATARI 2600!

[cTrix] made this device with a custom EPROM chip plugged in as a cartridge. Although details of the build are somewhat vague, this custom chip allows music to be written for the device. Everything is controlled with a joystick that tells the GATARI to generate the desired track. From this basic track, the sound is modified using three pedals including an equalizer, a flange pedal, and a hold pedal.

Check out the video after the break for a brief explanation of how it was built. Skip to 1:05 if you’d rather just see it in action at [Blipfest] in Japan!

If you’d rather listen to music rather than playing it, why not build your own snap together boombox instead!

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A Floppy Drive Orchestra

December 30, 2011 by Jeremy Cook 16 Comments

With 8 drives working in concert, this “floppy drive array orchestra” takes drive music to a whole new level! As if that wasn’t enough, [SileNT] decided to use the16x64 LED array that he’s been working on in concert with the drives.

For those that remember, we’ve actually featured [SileNT], AKA [Pawel]’s, work before, where we were impressed that he was able to play the Imperial March from Star Wars on 2 floppy drives. He’s planning more information about his floppy drive music making in the future and maybe even instructions on building your own personal disk drive orchestra. Apparently [SileNT] has an abundant supply of 3 1/2 inch drives, so maybe even this feat can be topped…

Be sure to check out the video after the break of these 8 drives in action. In the video, more tunes are promised “soon”, so be sure to check back or subscribe to him on Youtube for more sweet melodies. Continue reading “A Floppy Drive Orchestra” →

Nine Not-so-easy Steps To Build A Singing Tesla Coil

December 10, 2011 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

We love a good Tesla coil music performance, but have never really considered building our own. After reading [TheHomebrewGuru’s] guide to musical Tesla coils we’re still not considering it. Whether or not you’re going to undertake the project, his massive writeup is worth a look.

The tutorial begins at the beginning, with a bit of background on these devices, including what they are, where they came from, and the electrical theory behind them. From there it’s on to the build. This isn’t a go-out-and-buy it type of project. You’re going to need some ingenuity to hunt down parts that will work, and will work with each other.

The image above shows a partially built device, using sheet metal ductwork covered in foil tape as the torroid at the top. The column is wrapped in wire, forming the secondary coil, and the wooden base is ready for the installation of the primary coil. Electronics will be housed between the two wood discs of the base, with a TI Launchpad board driving the music part of the hack.

There isn’t a good demo video of this playing music. But you can get the idea if you look back at the head-mounted tesla coil which did a great job of pumping out the tunes.