Artist and “fountaineer” Alexis Richter has created a water fountain that analyses music and synchronizes its movement and light.

Richter’s hardware analyses the music being played then uses that information to control the fountain’s water pump and RGB LEDs. That gives him the ability to create colorful, kinetic displays of water synced perfectly to music.

The fountain has been on show at music festivals and public spaces all over the UK, including Glastonbury Festival and Boomtown. You can see more examples of it in motion on Instagram, and you can read more details or book it for your event on Richter’s website.

 

SimpleRick is a low-cost DIY 2D ultrasound imaging hardware project designed by William Meng.

SimpleRick makes innovative use of Software Defined Radio, pairing it with an ultrasound transducer to make a maker-friendly, affordable ultrasound imager. It works by sending out acoustic sound waves and then listening for audio bouncing back from objects in the path of the waves.

Meng’s project is based on an open hardware ultrasound project called un0rick. For SimpleRick, Meng replaced the more expensive specialist components in un0rick with a Teensy and Software Defined Radio.

Meng has written up the SimpleRick project and released the hardware design files and code under the TAPR Open Hardware License over on his GitHub, where you can also find an overview of the system architecture and some great experiment logs.

“Luz” has used a Teensy 3.5 to make a device that is capable of reading and writing old SEGA ROMs.

The retro computing and retro gaming communities are always a fantastic source of inspiring electronics hacks. This awesome project uses a Teensy 3.5 to read and write old SEGA ROMs. For this project, Luz decided to go even more retro by using an old school technique called wire wrapping instead of making a PCB.

Wire wrapping involves making electrical connections with a tool that wraps bare wire around a connection point rather than using solder. You can read more about this fun technique in this Jameco blog post, or you can see how Luz used it in this project in the photo above.

Once wired up, Luz uses this project to read old SEGA ROMs, allowing us to use the code in gaming emulators or even alter the code and write it back to the ROM  with added cheats! Luz has released the code for this project on GitHub.

Musician and maker Ghost in Translation has made a simple polyphonic FM synth called SimpleSynth.

SimpleSynth is a Teensy-based polyphonic synth with a pleasingly simple design. It can perform FM, AM and ring mod synthesis with one carrier and one modulator, and has arpeggiator and drone modes. Attack, decay and release can be controlled, as well as modulator gain and frequency.

Making use of a Teensy audio board, Teensy 3.2 and nine potentiometers, it is compatible with any midi instrument or DAW that sends MIDI note messages, and has a specific light-up feature when used with the Novation Launchpad S. Ghost in Translation posted about SimpleSynth on the forum, with a demo uploaded to YouTube and detailed build notes with code on GitHub.

Colin Alston has made X-UHF: a low cost RF prototyping system for experimentation with VHF and UHF bands.

Colin Alston is a fan of the X-Microwave products but they were more advanced than he needed and more expensive than he could justify spending as an RF hobbyist. So, Alston set out to make a low cost RF prototyping system using a Teensy 3.5 and the Teensy Audio library. After trying out a few approaches Alston managed to make it work! He explains that he chose to “mix down to a 10khz IF, then use a Biquad filter with a 15Khz highpass stage and 0.7 Q factor. This effectively converts the FM to AM. Then to convert the AM I simply run an abs function on the stream”.

Luckily for us, Alston has published lots of details about this project, plus all the fun developments along the way. You can find the build logs over at Hackaday.io, you can take a look at the code on Alston’s GitHub, and you can find the design files for all the 3D printed components on Thingyverse.

 

Cirque have released a circular trackpad development kit for game designers who want to experiment with capacitive touch interfaces in VR and AR.

Cirque make capacitive touch interfaces for VR and AR gaming systems. They make a number of hardware development kits that allow game developers to work with interactive technologies. Their Circle Trackpad game developer kit includes a Teensy 3.2, a pair of circular trackpads and an adaptable “breadboard style” PCB.

You can find example code for the Circle Trackpad game developer kit on Cirque’s GitHub, and they have also released the schematic for the board. As well as the circular form factor, Cirque make a more traditional rectangular trackpad game developer kit that also comes with a Teensy 3.2.

What do you do when you live on an island but need to get mobile reception? Make your own cell phone, of course! That’s just what forum user Jim Lee ended up doing using Adafruit’s FeatherFONA and a Teensy 3.2.

The FeatherFONA is an audio, SMS and data-capable cellular development board that at heart is an ATmega32u4. It can be powered off a 3.7v lithium ion battery making it perfect for building tiny but powerful mobile hardware projects. Lee found that the FeatherFONA alone wouldn’t be enough to drive an additional GUI, however, and so he brought a Teensy 3.2 into the mix to handle the user interface on a 2.8″ TFT LCD display. He wrote a program that would share SD card storage between the FeatherFONA and Teensy 3.2 “acting as a database” using blockFile and a command line parser. In addition to being able to make and receive calls, hold a contacts list, and take notes, the phone includes indie games and a calculator Jim made.

Not only is the resulting phone truly inspiring, but Jim was kind enough to share an abundance of information about the project in his blog from developing the initial idea to building the final product. He also recently shared the project on Adafruit’s show and tell. For those who want to try their hand at making their own DIY cell phone, Jim also released his source code on Github and the 3D print files for the case on Thingiverse.

Skintimacy is a hardware art and interaction project that measures conductivity between one lead player and four secondary players, triggering sounds or visuals that change with different amounts of touch.

The Skintimacy MIDI Touch Instrument is a project by the creative coder and composer Sonia Paço-Rocchia. This project uses a Skintimacy boards and a Teensy to create a MIDI instrument that works with any music software. When the players touch each other you get a higher controller value, which allows you to trigger effects, distort sounds or play different notes.

You can browse a range of ways of using this technology on the Skintimacy project page, plus you can check out their website to find circuit diagrams, code, set up instructions and a way to request a Skintimacy kit.

Skintimacy is by design researcher Alexander Müller-Rakow in collaboration with the sound artist Oscar Palou.  The project is part of a larger research project from The Design Research Lab at the Berlin University of the Arts.

Amateur astronomer JJ has made a radio telescope for detecting pulsars.

JJ’s DIY radio telescope detects electromagnetic radiation from neutron stars. Pulsars are rotating neutron stars that are highly magnetised. They emit a beam of electromagnetic radiation that, due to the rotation of the star, appears to be pulsing to an observer. JJ built a radio telescope designed to observe these pulses of radiation. They recently detected their first pulsar.

In JJ’s design, the Teensy 3.2 is used as an analog to digital converter, digitalizing the signal at the output of the radio telescope’s detector. JJ reports that the Teensy 3.2 performed really well in this role, but that learned that they needed to deactivate the LED blinking as it showed up in the data, with both the LED blink and the pulsar period being close to one second.

There are more pictures from JJ’s project below. To find out more about this impressive build, visit JJ’s website or take a look at their report on technique, testing and first observations. 

 

Jean Marc is using the Teensy 4.0 and a wide angle LCD screen to run an Atari 520ST emulator and play classic games.

This pocket-sized retro gaming emulator by Jean Marc packs a punch, supporting five classic gaming consoles: the Atari2600, the Philips Videopac/Odyssey, the Colecovision, the NES and the Atari800. Jean Marc uses a Teensy 4.0, a TFT LCD screen, an analog joypad and a few buttons to create a system that can play classic games including RoboCop, Rick Dangerous and Red Heat.

Part one of the Teensy 4.0 Atari build video is above. You can see the rest of the build plus examples of it in action in the second video below. You can find Jean-Marc’s code for this fantastic retro computing project on his GitHub, along with pictures of his wiring and build processes.