Roomba And Virtual Walls Make Up This Theme Family Halloween Costume

It figures. You spend a ton of time making a cool set of costumes and then you can’t get your kid to pose for a picture. It’s okay though, we still get the point. This themed set of costumes dresses the little one as a Roomba vacuuming robot while mom and dad are suited up as virtual walls (modules that are used to keep the bot from falling down stairs, etc.). It’s fun and unique, but had it not been for some additional electronics this would have been relegated to a links post. For safety sake each costume was outfitted with a ring of LEDs. As a challenge, the lights were given the ability to sync up patterns with each other.

Each costume has a circular frame at the top with a set of RGB LED strings attached. To get them to display synchronized patterns an IR transmitter/receiver board was designed and ordered from OSHPark. Each costume has four of these modules so no matter where the wearers are facing it should not break communications. A demo of the synchronized light rings can be seen after the break

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Light Painting With A String Plotter

[Matt Bell] sends a shout-out to Hackaday by creating a light-painting of our logo with his string plotter. He starts off by setting up a pair of stepper motors which each have a spool to wind and unwind a string. The plotter is made by suspending a stylus between these two strings. In this case, he’s using a wireless LED board (seen above) built from the remote control receiver/transmitter from a toy car. The link above is part of a Flickr set from which you can get the whole story by reading the captions of each image.

After the break we’ve embedded a clip of an in-progress light painting. You can see there’s some oscillation of the LED unit that makes it a bit less precise than the CNC light painter we saw a couple of weeks ago. It seems like string plotters usually don’t have this issue if the stylus has something to help stabilize it. We wonder if a piece of acrylic would help get rid of the shakes? Continue reading “Light Painting With A String Plotter”

Shovel…guitar?

We didn’t believe this hack at all when we saw it, or rather heard it. Surly a guitar made out of a shovel couldn’t sound decent. But the video (after the jump, skip to 2:40 for the jam) to our untrained ears sounded pretty rad. Could be the supremely well done wood work, proper use of tools, high tech pickups, or maybe Russian magic, we don’t know.

In fact, if you continue the video it doesn’t stop there. The creators also made a 2 string bass and a few other instruments from shovels. Do I smell a new shovel hero?

Related: Guitars made out of things that should not be guitars.

[Thanks Paul]

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Bassoforte And Other New Instruments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhp6P9Ygsoc]

[Diego Stocco] makes music with instruments he assembled. For instance, his Bassoforte uses piano keys, the neck and strings from an electric bass, and what look like some cymbals. Throw in a hammer from that piano and a double bass bow (plus heavy use of audio software) and he’s in business. Big business actually, his work has been in video games such as The Conduit and in feature films like Sherlock Holmes where he worked with Hans Zimmer. Bassoforte isn’t his only invention, he’s got several more including the Experibass string family on one instrument, the Light Controlled Oscillator, and sand music using the fine aggregate along with some piezoelectric film transducers.

[Thanks LuciusMare]

HDD Actuated Acoustical Instrument

This is the multichord, a one-string musical instrument built by [Christopher Mitchell]. The string is a 20 pound mono-filament thread stretched between a wooden bridge and the read/write head of a hard drive. The idea is that the vibrations of the string are picked up and amplified acoustically by the sounding box that serves as the body of the instrument. The frequency of vibration (pitch) is changed by adjusting the tension of the string through the application of various voltages to the HDD head. A relief spring has been added to the head to take the resting tension off of it, making it a lot easier to fine-tune the settings for each note. A keyboard made of twelve buttons selects each different pitch as the string is plucked.

[Christopher] is continuing to post great hacks; we’ve seen a glove input and a giant VU meter from him in the past. Take a look at the multichord in action after the break.

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