Andrew Ashe, Jerry Sandys, and Peter Gibbs sent a balloon to near space.

The balloon is filled with helium and is equipped with cameras, and iridium satellite modem, a Teensy using Mikal Hart’s GPS code, and a.  The balloon achieved and altitude of about 35 km and captured video showing the beginning of the black of space.  The payload was recovered using the iridium tracker.

 

Sebastian Tomczak continues to create great MIDI devices, this time a USB MIDI to Eight Gates and Sixteen Control Voltage outputs.

The control voltage (CV) outputs are 12-bit and 0V to 4.096V in range, with a four octave range for pitch.

The device has 3 mapping modes – 0, 1, and 2.

In mapping mode 0, gates 1 to 8 respond to note on and note off messages on MIDI channels 1 to 8. CV outputs 1 to 8 are determined by the pitch of note on messages on MIDI channels 1 to 8. CV outputs 9 to 16 are determined by the velocity of note on messages on MIDI channels 1 to 8.

In mapping mode 1, gates 1 to 8 respond to note on and note off messages on MIDI channels 1 to 8. CV outputs 1 to 8 are determined by the pitch of note on messages on MIDI channels 1 to 8. CV outputs 9 to 16 are determined by the control change message for controller 1 on MIDI channels 1 to 8.

In mapping mode 2, gates 1 to 8 respond to note on and note off messages on MIDI channels 1 to 8. CV outputs 1 to 16 are determined by the pitch bend value of pitch bend messages on MIDI channels 1 to 16.

You can find downloads of the code, schematic, and PCB layout for the project on the Little-Scale blog post/project page.

Smart Interior Systems built a pretty amazing LED Music visualization wall.

The 16′ x 8 ‘ wall is made up of 10 4′ x 4’ panels.  It has a Teensy 3.2 driving 2560 WS2811 LEDs and uses the FastLED library, ARTNET/DMX protocol, and Jinkx 2.4 software.  For power they used 5V 30 Amp switched-mode power supplies (SMPS) for every 512 LEDs.

Loyal J made a cool USB pinball controller, Pinbox Jr,  to use on your PC.

The Pinbox JR is a USB controller that gives PC games the feel of playing on a real pinball table.  It interfaces with a PC as a USB keyboard and maps the pinball buttons to various keys on the keyboard.  The latest version of the Pinbox Jr includes an accelerometer to simulate the tilt feature if you shake the controller.

Code for the project can be found on Github

Anthony DiGirolamo has made a great Teensy Thumb Keyboard.

This small tactile keyboard is super to use with handheld projects.  It has 60 keys arranged in a QWERTY layout and number keys arranged in a number pad layout.   The board has beginner friendly through hole soldering with a Teensy, 60 pushbuttons, and 10 zener diodes.

Anthony used this thumb board to make a handheld Raspberry Pi.  Using the Teensy he was able to add backlight control and low batter monitoring in addition to controlling the keyboard.

Code for the project can be found in the Teensy Thumb Keyboard Github repository.  KiCad files are available or you can also order the PCB from Tindie.  Finally, you can find the files to 3D print the case used for the handheld Pi project on Thingverse.

Branan Riley has published a series of very informative tutorials  – Exploring Rust on Teensy.

The tutorials are targeted at people who have a basic knowledge of Rust and “lightweight” embedded development experience.  The first tutorial covers bootup of the processor to getting the LED to blink – with a good number of topics covered in between.  Parts two and three go on to cover serial communication and hardware allocation.  Each of the tutorials has quite a lot of information and detailed explanations of a number of topics important in embedded development.  Overall this series is a great way to get going on programming Teensy using Rust.

Branan has indicated that the next tutorial in the series will cover DMA (Direct Memory Access) and interrupts will be in another upcoming tutorial

Update on the Teensy/rust stuff: DMA as a Future works! And I think I've convinced myself it's safe! I wanted to do interrupts, but I might save those for another post. That means I'm really ready to finish the prose and get it up!

— Brananarchy (@branan) November 11, 2018

The tutorial series can be found on Github.

Forum user Austin519 made a stylish, sound reactive LED light up coat.

The coat features 673 WS2812 LEDs driven by a Teensy 3.2, Prop Shield, and an ADMP401 MEMS microphone.  It’s powered bu 2 5200mAh lipo batteries.  It includes some user controls to change the pattern, sound reactivity, and overall brightness.

Tomash Ghzegovsky made a very cool DIY drum machine for the 2017 Fasma Festival

The goal of the project was to come up with something small, affordable, and buildable in just a few hours.  The result was this portable, battery-powered drum machine.

While this drum machine may be small in size, it’s not small on features.  It has 4 voices (kick, tom, snare, and hat) and 4 parameter controls per voice – pitch, decay pitch modulation, and distortion.  A 9V battery will power this little guy for up to 7.5 hours.  More information on the features can be found on this GHZ LABS page.

Tomash put some great documentation together so that you can build your own.  A manual, schematics, bill of materials, gerber files, and firmware are all available on this GitHub page.

Kerry Scharfglass got this 28″ Surface Studio.

The “feels like Minority Report” touch/pen interface was less than ideal for KiCAD, so he build this one-handed keyboard macro pad.

Watching people use the Surface studio has been interesting.  It seems to have some great potential, but functionality with most software programs is lacking and seems to make the Surface awkward to use.

This project is a great example of using Teensy and some DIY ingenuity to improve usability.

Designing a PCB from the comfort of your couch seems pretty enticing.  Maybe DIY projects like this one can make this a reality.

Tony Brewer, forum user tonton81 developed a library for a master board to control multiple slave boards.

This library allows you to take advantage of the speed of SPI when communicating between 2 Teensys, making it much faster than ordinary serial.

The lengthy forum thread where this library was developed documents the collaborative effort that made it happen.

The code, along with some details on the features, can be found on GitHub.