Marcel Boonman created a thinking dodecahedron he describes as a metaphor to simulate the dyslexic way of information processing: ‘conceptual thinking’. The environment serves as input to create an ‘imaginary object’.  This is a very interesting project and it’s well worth watching the video.

The project uses a Teensy 2.0 and sensors to measure color, illumination, sound, temperature, humidity, and atmospheric pressure.  The measurements from these elements are used to produce a color. The Dodecaeder refers to the fifth element the ether, which is also seen as the mind or in this case the imaginary; A mental representation of multiple ideas (including experiences) that are summarized in an imaginary object.

Ken Horner submitted his Semi-Autonomous Robot Beach Wagon on the forum.  This beauty can haul a 200 pound load over a large sand dune.  It’s great for hauling gear and giving rides.

This video gives a great over view of the build process.  My favorite part is seeing a wagon, loaded with beach gear, cruise easily up and over a sand dune.

Jon Payne created his own MPC (Music Production Center).  He was inspired by an MPC and the DJ Tech Tools MIDI Fighter and decided to create and build a stand alone project that is a combination of the two.  This is a really impressive DIY project.  It sounds awesome and looks great.

While Jon describes it as a work in progress, it is functional with more features being planned.

Discussion of the project can be found on the forum.

Jon Watte (jwatte on the forum) built an autonomously navigating rover.  This awesome rover is built for the outdoors and has individual steering on the 4 corner wheels.  Not only can this impressive rover follow a track, but it can climb up stairs as well!

Jon took it to a race early this month and placed 2nd out of 20!  Way to go!

Here’s a training pass video showing the rover following a track.

And another video showing the rover climbing stairs.

The code for the project is available on GitHub

 

 

 

 

Brad Slattery created a build-it-yourself LED based kit for a classic PONG style video game using.  Retroball can be played with 2 to 4 players with levels ranging from easy to mayhem.

The project is open source and allows for users to run their own experiments.  This is a pretty awesome way to take a basic LED matrix and turn it into a fun game that’s also hackable.

Defragster, a frequent forum contributor, added Teensy support for the project.  His forum post includes the details of how he made this happen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Patrick McFadden and the team at Iris Dynamics developed an affordable force feedback flight sim control yoke.

Force feedback yokes are about the realistic implementation of trim.   Trim adjustments, weight and balance changes, speed, and aircraft configuration all effect the natural resting position of the yoke. When you use a traditional yoke which does not allow this “neutral” position to shift throughout various states of flight, an unacceptable level of realism is lost.  This force feedback yoke gives a realistic feel to flight simulation.

The design is open architecture to allow users to customize and update every bit of the software and hardware.

Marcus Olsson built a sound reactive LED jar for a music hack weekend.

He named it “Don’t Look At Me LED” because when turned up to full brightness it’s really hard to look straight at it.  That’s what 576 LEDs glued around a 16cm jar will do for you.  I love the sound reactive nature of this project as well as the scrolling text feature.

Project details can be found at:

Website Demo: http://www.slickstreamer.info/2013/11/dont-look-at-me-led-jar-spotify-mmhw.html

Website Build: http://www.slickstreamer.info/2013/11/dont-look-at-me-led-jar-build-guide.html

Giovanni Carrera ported the KS0108 GLCD library to Teensy 3.x.  His blog has a great write of the porting process and the technical details.  This system can be used in several applications, such as portable low frequency oscilloscopes, FFT analyzers, data loggers etc.

 

 

Forum user wolke recently posted about his monophonic guitar synthesizer.  This DIY project has an impressive list of features.  This is a German language video that demos the cool effects.  The unique sounds remind me of spaceage music.

The code for the project is posted on Github https://github.com/wolkstein/GitSynth127

The modified audio library is on Github as well https://github.com/wolkstein/Audio

Discussion about the project can be found over on the forum.

Jason Kotzin made some mods to an off the shelf Tron disc because everything is better with more LEDs.  What an awesome way to take an off the shelf prop and turn it into something pretty cool.

The code is open source and can be found on this Git Hub repository.