Not your run-of-the-mill webcam, Mike’s photobooth uses a Canon DSLR camera and softbox lighting for superior quality photos.  The booth does preview, customization, printing, and can automatically upload to the internet, but is easy for anyone to use with a giant arcade button.

As the official photographer for a good friend’s wedding, Mike decided he wanted an “open air booth” with built-in softbox lighting and could use a dSRL camera.  It also needed to be easy to use as the official photog he didn’t want it to consume his time at the wedding.

The photo booth is built on a rolling tool cabinet making it easy to cart around.  It runs the dSLR Remote Pro software on an old HP Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz computer.  A Teensy is used to add arcade style buttons to simulate keyboard shortcuts in the software to allow the user to switch between photo/video modes, start the image/video capture, and enable/disable the camera’s live view.

Code for the project can be found on this blog page.

Adam Haile at Manical Labs found a way to make his beloved trackball mouse cool by making a billiard ball arcade trackball mouse.

Not only is Adam a bit obsessed with the trackball mouse, but he’s also a billiards fan.  So when he saw a character using a 9-Ball mouse in the movie Oceans 8, he knew he had to have one.

He used an arcade trackball as a base and added some LED arcade buttons.  A 3-D printing housing was create to custom fit his hand.  A custom PCB made it easy to wire the buttons and trackball to the Teensy and also made it easy to mount the electronics.

The USB HID functionality of a Teensy along with the Encoder library made quick work of the code for the project.

Code for the project as well as the PCB designs and CAD files are available on GitHub.

Ben McInnes, Adoné Kitching, Jason Sutherland, and Luc Wolthers created an amazing game – Guitar Wizards.

Guitar Wizard is a game based of the classic Guitar Hero game.  Rather than play for points, the players battle each other, head on, playing riffs on the modified Guitar Hero controllers, shooting LED notes at each other.  The opposing player blocks the notes by playing their own notes and chords.

This amazing, interactive game is powered by a Teensy 3.6, has over 2,000 WS2812B LEDs, and uses the FastLED library.

You can read more about the inspiration for the game here.

Wojciech Sura (forum user spook) has made a very useful tool for creating and editing fonts for the ILI9341 display

Until now, the only way to get custom fonts in the ILI9341 display has been a converter script.  Now you can actually create & edit fonts with a beautiful graphics editor.

This useful app includes a number of features, including:

• Create font from scratch (specify size, default offset and delta)
• Create font from existing system TTF font
• Easy to use editor with zoom (mouse wheel) and scroll (middle button) as well as continuous drawing
• Preview the whole font or specific string
• Batch glyph operations allows quick tweaks (for instance, batch offset change)
• Quick optimization of character or the whole set (removes empty columns and rows while keeping character’s position and size)
• Export to ILI9341_t3 format (.h + .cpp)

The editor is available in this GitLab repository.  It does require Visual Studio 2017 to build.  If you don’t have access to Visual Studio, spook has posted a build in this forum thread.

 

Petros Kokotis developed a replacement for the ever popular SID chip (MOS Technology 6581/8580) using a Teensy 3.6.

The SID was a popular sound synthesizer chip from the 1980s used in the Commodore 64 computer.  Much to the dismay of many nostalgic computer enthusiasts, it hasn’t been manufactured for many years.

Petros used a Teensy 3.6 and some level shifting boards to intercept address and data lines of a SID chip.  He also used the Teensy Audio Library and the ReSID Library by Frank Bösing (from his C64 emulation).

Code for the project can be found in this GitHub repository.

 

gdsports has made a joystick splitter that solves the problem of the Microsoft Xbox Adaptive Controller (XAC) ignoring the hat switch on the Logitech Extreme 3D Pro Flight Stick.

The splitter uses 2 Teensy-LC boards and an Adafruit ItstyBitsy to remap the joystick controls and maps the Logictech Flight Stick to the XAC in the following ways:

• Joystick X,Y maps to the left thumbstick
• Hat 8-way switch maps to the right thumbstick
• 4 top buttons map to A, B, X, Y
• Front trigger maps to right bumper
• Side trigger maps to left bumper

Code for the project can be found in this Github repository.

Brian Taylor of Bolder Flight has put together a great tutorial on Pulse Width Modulation (PWM).

PWM is commonly used to control servos and electronic speed controllers (ESC) and is useful for many projects.  This tutorial explains PWM and introduces how to wire up and command a servo  Part 2 of the tutorial go over reading PWM commands.

The tutorial features the PWM Backback by Bolder Flight.  This handy backbpack makes it easy to hookup RC Servo Motors to your Teensy.  It features 8 channels of 16 bit PWM output; bused ground, power, and standard servo connectors; and option SBUS communication input.

Darryl McGee and Steve Barile of Conductive Labs have developed the NDLR (pronounced Noodler), a 4-part poly sequenced arpeggiator, chord and drone player based on the Teensy 3.2.

The guys at Conductive Labs came with a unique solution to break down music theory into knobs and controls. The NDLR has four parts that can play up to 8 synths.  The PAD part is a chord player.  Press one of the 7 chord buttons and all the other parts change notes to match.  There are also 2 “Motifs” which are sequenced arpeggiators.  The Drone part can play a single continuous note like a traditional drone does… or choose from various retrigging options, such as having the note retrigger on a chord change, the down beat, every beat, up beat, etc.

Among the many advanced features packed into the NDLR is a pattern and rhythm editor that lets you create custom arpeggios.  You can also save your patches and settings for later recall with the 8 global slave slots, 20 user patter slots, and 20 user rhythm slots.

You can get a NDLR through their IndiGoGo campaign

This video is of a performance by Graig Anthony Perkins using the NDLR.

John Grant built MyComm,  a very clever solar global messaging device.

MyComm is a portable messaging device that allows users to send messages from anywhere on Earth.  It uses the Iridium satellite system to offer coverage beyond traditional cellular and WiFi networks.  Because it’s solar powered you don’t need to worry about battery life.

Code for the project can be found on BitBucket

Details on how to set up a MyComm Server is documented on this page and the code is available on GitHub.

https://github.com/johngrantuk/myCommServer

Brian Taylor and the team at Bolder Flight Systems have developed a low -latency, deterministic, scalable flight control system.

Bolder Flight Systems is an spinoff from the University of Minnesota UAS Research labs.  They found that at the time the they were working on research, they weren’t really happy with the low-cost options out there so they developed their own primarily to better handle latency and determinism.  Their development has evolved from using a MPC-Tiny processor and adding a Teensy 3.2 to using a Teensy 3.6 and BeagleBone Black.

They wanted a system that could scale from simple drones to extremely complex aircraft with a large amounts for sensor and actuator I/O.  Their efforts have lead to a scalable system to a virtually unlimited number of sensor and actuators while maintaining determinism and a constant, well defined latency.

Technical details (as well as purchasing details) can be found over at Bolder Flight Systems. They have also developed a series of Teensy shields, or Backpacks to allow you to easily add different modules to your Teensy. Low level drivers for for all their sensors are available on GitHub.