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.

Playing Classic 60s Tunes With An All Electronic Band

December 6, 2011 by Mike Nathan 16 Comments

house-of-the-rising-sun

If you are considering repurposing some old computer equipment to create music, be aware that the bar has been raised just a tad. YouTube user [BD594] spent some time sifting through his bin of used electronics and put together a 5-piece band that plays a pretty awesome rendition of The Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun”.

Last week, we saw a pretty impressive hack with a floppy drive that could bang out music using a calculator, but this takes things to a whole new level. [BD594] used an old HP ScanJet to simulate the song’s vocals, while an Atari 800XL combined with an oscilloscope is used as an organ. A Ti-99/4a is used in conjunction with another scope to play guitar notes, while a PIC-controlled hard drive does double duty, playing both the bass drum and cymbals.

We dare you to watch the video below and NOT be thoroughly impressed with his work.

[BD594] says that once he has a bit of free time, he’ll be putting out another video – something we’ll be anxiously waiting to see.

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Making Sweet Floppy Drive Music With A Calculator

December 1, 2011 by Mike Nathan 14 Comments

floppy-music-ti83-style

[Chris] says that he’s been pretty busy lately, leaving little opportunity for hacking. However he did manage to find a little time to put together a small project that has occupied his to-do list for a while – a floppy drive music controller.

We have seen hacks that use microcontrollers to actuate floppy drive motors before, but we can’t remember anything that used a calculator to do the job instead. While a microcontroller gives you plenty of I/O pins to play with, [Chris’] Ti-83+ only has two.

Even with the calculator’s I/O limitations, he didn’t find the task too overly difficult as he merely needed to hold a pair of the drive’s pins low, while pulsing two others. He modified a media player written for Ti calculators to output the necessary control signals, then he cranked out some tunes.

As you can see in the video below, his simple setup works quite well – not bad for just a few hours’ work.

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Annoy Your Sound Guy Even More

November 1, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 39 Comments

“I can’t hear myself in the mix,” “yeah, man, I’ll be there at 8,” and “dude, we need like four more mics.” Each and every one of these words is documented in actuarial tables and doesn’t bode well for your sound tech’s risk of a stroke. Luckily, there’s an even better way to kill your sound guy and this time, it’s actually pretty clever.

[@dop3j0e] at the Stuttgart hackerspace Shackspace came up with the Noiseplug. It’s a very small build that could almost fit into a quarter-inch jack. It’s all SMD with a tiny ~~(unknown)~~ ATtiny9 microcontroller powered by a watch battery.

The music coming out of the Noiseplug is really interesting. All the code on the microcontroller is a one-liner written in C. Similar ‘algorithmic chiptune’ programs can be run on any PC: check out these three examples.

These potential entries to the International Obfuscated C Code Contest throw chars into an 8-bit PCM stream. Piping the output of these programs to /dev/audio would generate an actual song – written entirely in one line of C.

Of course, [@dop3j0e] could have made his Noiseplug a little less annoying, but sound techs are underappreciated for a reason, right?

Check out the Noiseplug in action after the break along with a few one-liner C songs.

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Halloween Hacks: A Light And Music Show Fit For [Jack Skellington]

October 28, 2011 by Mike Nathan 4 Comments

Halloween Hacks Banner

singing_pumpkin_halloween_show

[Greg] was looking for something to build using his recently acquired Arduino, and with Halloween approaching, he thought a cool light display would make a great project. He browsed around online and found this tutorial that shows how to build a chorus of singing pumpkins controlled by a computer’s parallel port. Since he didn’t have any computers with a parallel port kicking around anymore, he decided to try his hand at recreating it with an Arduino.

[Greg] gathered eight light up Jack-o-Lanterns, along with a handful of relays and other miscellaneous components. He wired up the relays to trigger each individual pumpkin’s built in light when switched by the Arduino. He sat down and carefully listened through “This is Halloween” from The Nightmare Before Christmas, choreographing each of the pumpkins to take on the voice of one of the movie’s characters.

When the show begins, the display transforms from a group of unassuming pumpkins with candles a-flicker to a chorus of ghouls extolling the virtues of Halloween.

It really is fun to watch, so be sure to check out the video below. If you’re looking to throw together a quick display before the big day rolls around, [Greg’s] source code and diagrams should get you headed in the right direction.

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Singing House Lights Up Halloween Again This Year

October 25, 2011 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

[KJ92508] is flooding the neighborhood with light again this year. Everyone knows of that one house in town that really goes all out, but few put on a show anything like this one. The four Jack-o’-lantern faces lead the way with the opening sequence from A Nightmare Before Christmas. Each has at least four different mouth poses, and two eye orientations which are surprisingly well synchronized with the audio. The image above shows mostly orange lighting, but the home is outfitted with addressable RGB LEDs for a full color performance. In fact, it has seen an upgrade this year, increasing the channels by eight-fold to 1144! Don’t miss the performance which we’ve embedded after the break.

We had considered not featuring this, since we looked in on the same home last year. But the number of tips that rolled in made us think that a lot of you missed it, or are just delighted by the multitude of blinky lights. Either way, it’s worth the four minutes out of your day– it will either put a smile on your face, or make you glad not to live across the street from this guy.

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Wireless Hackerspace Music Control

October 12, 2011 by Mike Nathan 8 Comments

skipbutton_bitlair.nl

The crew at the Netherlands-based Bitlair hackerspace love their music, and have set up a digital jukebox for their workshop using mpd and fookebox. One problem that you run into with a bunch of different people working in one place is that everyone has their own distinct taste in music. The rhythmic “wub wub wub” of Dubstep might be great for some while leaving others trying to solder while simultaneously covering their ears. To ensure that everyone can exercise a musical veto (a la Empire Records) now and again, they built a Skipbutton which allows members to change what’s playing.

The button allows users to skip to the next song in the queue. as well as to control the volume of the space’s sound system. It uses an Arduino pro mini to run the show, sending signals to the mpd daemon using a 433 MHz transmitter. Bitlair is pretty large and they often spend time outdoors, so they had to ensure that the Skipbutton worked wherever they did. To do this, they built a Yagi-Uda antenna at the receiving end to ensure that the button functions no matter where it’s being triggered from.

Check out their wiki if you’re interested in making a similar system for your home or hackerspace – all of the code and schematics are available for the taking.