Michele Perla put together a DIY USB MIDI Controller.  The MPC (Music Production Controller).

This video shows the controller in action at the Rome MakerFaire.

Mick needed a simple and effective instrument to create drum beats without having to manually write them note by note.  He wanted something more than most of the DIY MIDI controllers out there that use simple on/off buttons.  The answer was to build his own using force sensitive resistors (FSRs).

 

The controller has 16 buttons using FSRs arranged in a 4×4 matrix.  The FSRs can sense the amount of pressure applied to a button and use that information for things such as a velocity of a note, control change value, etc.

There is a pretty good write up on his HackADay.IO project page that includes schematics of the project.

Dave built a home heating monitor to collect data on the duty cycle of all the heating zones in his house in hopes better understanding the activity  off all the zones in order to reduce oil usage and save a few bucks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The first version of the project didn’t pan out so well.  The controller used didn’t work out so well.  In version 2 of the project Dave used Teensys to take data measurements and send the data another controller.

Dave found that storing the data on a webserver is easier than storing it in an embedded device, and displaying the data in HTML on a web page is more flexible that doing it in a Windows app.

 

 

Timothy Meyer helped his daughter improve her TARDIS pinewood derby car by adding light and sound to it.

Timothy used an orphaned micro speaker, a jiggle-switch motion sensor, and a blue LED to make the improvements.  The motion sensor allows for the TARDIS landing sound to be made when the car is touched.

The source code for the project can be found on the Nova Labs project page.