We saw a lot of interesting gear at Maker Faire last weekend and thought we’d highlight some of those projects this week. [Josh Boughey]’s Stribe was originally inspired by the monome 40h. It features of 16 columns of 64 LEDs for a total of 1024 individually addressable lights. Even with all those LEDs, PWM control means it can run off of USB power. 8 spectrasymbol softpots are used between the columns for user input. It’s really quite an amazing feat for being [josh]’s first board design. All of the circuit designs and firmware are available. Check out Flickr for more photos from this weekend.
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DIY Midi Pedalboard
[Nick] sent in this sweet midi pedal organ. [Seffan] modded an old set of organ pedals with the cheapest midi keyboard he could find. Each pedal was equipped with a switch mechanism, so it was just a matter of patience and wiring. To come up with enough wire for the job, he sacrificed some IDE cables. If you’ve ever played with some organ pedals, you know that these things can really add another dimension to music – especially with the newly added MIDI interface.
In-cable Guitar Preamp
[Bryan] sent in this old but excellent guitar cable hack. [J. Donald Tillman] managed to fit a fet based pre-amp inside the 1/4″ connector of a guitar cable. It’s phantom powered – so it’ll leach power from the sound board/mixer. I’m just impressed that he fit the thing inside there.
On a side note, This is the kind of crap that gives hackers a bad name. I hope the jerks behind it end up as Soylent Green.
