Many developers turn to Teensy when speed is critical, but we didn’t realize our reputation extended to the Bonneville Salt Flats!

Teensy forum user noisymime, aka Josh Stewart, developer of the Speeduino open-source engine management system, has been trying his hand at turbines, rather than piston-powered engine controls. He recently developed a  Teensy 3.5-powered full authority digital engine control (FADEC) for the 4000+ horsepower jet-engine-driven Turbinator II as part of a land speed record attempt.

Technical issues prevented a full 5-mile pass, but a shorter 3-mile run resulted in the fastest 1st, 2nd and 3rd mile speeds in the history of Bonneville Land Speed Racing, with peak GPS speeds of 447.9mph and a 3-mile average of 420mph. Watch the world’s fastest* Teensy, complete with data overlay, in the video below!

*have you built a faster Teensy-powered vehicle? let us know via the forums!

Some music producers like the hands on, computer-free, tactile experience of twiddling knobs on a modular rack. Others prefer a USB control surface connected to a PC.

But Sebastian Tomczak envisioned a scenario with the best of both worlds: a direct interface between USB MIDI controllers and CV-based Eurorack synths — without the bulk and expense of a computer in the middle!

The Teensy 3.6 has a USB host port (requires soldering of pins and USB Host Cable), and the ability to read and write voltages, as required to interface with a Eurorack system. This makes it the perfect intermediary between the two, and completely obviates the need for a computer.

With the addition of some 1k resistors and standard 3.5mm Eurorack sockets, plus code to read and store button presses in an array, a simple yet effective pattern sequencer can be realized. Additional detail can be found on Sebastian’s blog, while the example code resides on GitHub, and a sequencing demo can be found in the video below.

NOTE: PJRC recommends caution when interfacing Eurorack signals with Teensy.  The Teensy 3.6 pins can be damaged by voltage higher than 3.3 volts, or below ground.  Many Eurorack modules use -5V to +5V or -10V to +10V signals.  Opamps, buffers, or other circuitry are typically needed to safely connect these higher voltage signals to Teensy’s pins.

 

One of the most exciting aspects of the maker movement is its ability to empower individual enthusiasts with technology that was once the realm of large corporations and universities. A particularly impressive example of this phenomenon is McGill University Physics PhD student Dan Berard’s Teensy 3.1-based low-cost scanning tunneling microscope (STM) project.

Using a cheap piezo buzzer, Dan has accomplished atomic resolution with select materials, using a manually sharpened tip.

A detailed explanation of the techniques and components used in the project, as well as some incredible images generated by the system can be found on Dan’s blog.

Creative coder Eric Furst (@ef1j@post.lurk.org on Mastodon) is a master of retro-modern mashups.

For his latest project, he ditched the retrocomputing angle and went full futurism, using a Teensy 3.1 as the basis of his Dystopian Drone.

The Teensy outputs a continuously-evolving synthesized saw wave sound, which is then broadcast worldwide at http://echo.lurk.org:999/ef1j.mp3 as well as locally on 89.3 FM via a simple external transmitter. The result is deliciously chilling, and provided the perfect sinister soundbath for the authoring of this blog post.

Give it a listen, follow the project’s evolution on Mastodon, and be sure to take a gander at Eric’s wiki for more details on this and other creative coding and computational art projects.