Blog Posts

MIT Media Lab have developed the new and improved Knitted Keyboard II using electrically conductive, capacitive and piezoresistive fabrics and fibers.

The Knitted Keyboard II, from Irmandy Wicaksono and team, is a multi-modal, soft and stretchable e-textile musical interface. It responds to touch, including keystrokes, pressure, squeezing and pulling, and continuous proximity, such as hovering and waving. This means that you can play it in a range of ways: like a keyboard, a theremin or as something that is a mixture of the two. You can even wear it like a scarf.

MIT’s Knitted Keyboard II runs on a Teensy 4.0 and uses five MPR121 proximity/touch controllers. It uses MIDI and can therefore sound like any software instrument you have access to, making it incredibly versatile.

Check out Hackaday’s coverage of the Knitted Keyboard II or read the MIT project overview for more detail on this project.

The Audio shield is on sale for Black Friday (sale has ended), with sockets and a flash memory chip included.

 

Hardware hacker Hypothete has hooked up a Teensy 4.0 to an analog TV, to display JPG and PNG images in the NTSC video format.

The cozy hackerspace Ctrl-H in Portland runs an event twice a month called DorkbotPDX, which is where Hypothete came to show off Teensy TV, their super cool analog TV hack. The Teensy TV is made up of two parts: a Teensy 4.0 running an Arduino sketch, and a Node.js server sending data to the Teensy.

The whole project has been written up over on Hypothete’s GitHub, including wiring instructions, code and reference links if you want to dive further into the world of analog video hacking.

 

The Sky Vane is a reactive sound installation that generates a stunning ethereal soundtrack based on readings from atmospheric sensors.

The sounds you can hear in the tweets below are created from readings taken from a simple set of sensitive weather sensors (temperature, pressure, humidity, and light). These readings are dynamically assembled, manipulated, and evolved in real time using both a Raspberry Pi and Teensy microcontroller.

The Sky Vane is designed by pyka, a team that designs interactive sound tools and makes engaging experiences. Check out more projects from pyka on their website, their Twitter account or over on Instagram.

The Sky Vane is currently generating ‘Morning’ – the first of three day phases in the installation soundtrack that the readings from our atmospheric sensors is dynamically assembling, manipulating, and evolving in real time. pic.twitter.com/HVod4eH3X9

— pyka (@pyka_boo) August 14, 2021

The third phase of The Sky Vane soundtrack – “Evening” – generated by our weather sensor readings between 6pm – 10pm.
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.#installation #generativesound #generativeart #generativedesign #sculpture #arduino #teensy #raspberrypi #mindfulness #wellbeing #skygazing #cloudwatching pic.twitter.com/gK5HBHa4Gt

— pyka (@pyka_boo) August 19, 2021

The Vindor ES is an electronic saxophone / clarinet from Vindor Music with has a sophisticated and easy-to-play design.

The Vindor ES is a USB MIDI controller with a built-in synthesizer, speaker, headphone jack, plus a 1/4″ jack output for an amplifier or guitar pedal. Developed for the educational market, it comes with online and mobile education software.

The digital saxophone is controlled with a Teensy 3.1. Vindor used SPI (for the SD card), TSI (touch sensors for individual buttons) and DAC (for the audio generation, including the fabulous audio library). There is also a Freescale pressure sensor to measure breath and an amplifier/speaker.

Find more information and check out more feature demos over on the  Vindor Music website.

 

 

 

Welters Hackz has published details of a series of radio controlled vehicles, the YaRC 1 and 2 and the latest addition, YaRC mark 3.

The acronym YaRC stands for Yet another RC vehicle. The first YaRC was made out of Lego bricks and used a Teensy 3.2, a Raspberry Pi and various motors. The second YaRC added in a camera for video transmission and a WiFi dongle to help with communication. The third YaRC kept the software of the previous two projects but upgraded almost all of the hardware, including a chassis upgrade and a newer Raspberry Pi.

Welters Hackz has done a great job of documenting the evolution of this RC project, with build logs, schematic diagrams, component lists, useful explanations and links to helpful code repositories. Check out the YaRC project pages for the YaRC 1 and 2 and YaRC mark 3 on Hackaday.io.

PJRC forum user DD4WH made the Teensy Convolution SDR, a software defined radio for long wave, medium wave, short wave and wide band FM stereo.

Software defined radio (SDR) is a radio communication system in which the traditional hardware systems — such as mixers, amplifiers and filters — are replaced with software.

DD4WH used a Teensy 3.6, a PJRC audio board, a quadrature sampling detector (QSD), an oscillator capable of being tuned by I2C, three encoders and an antenna to make the Teensy Convolution SDR. DD4WH chose to do the main filtering and demodulation in the frequency domain using a fast convolution approach, enabling much steeper filters than the usual phasing approach.

Detailed specifications and a project guide for the Teensy Convolution SDR project have been published on DD4WH’s GitHub. The original forum post about the project is also really worth checking out, with helpful comments about sourcing components and troubleshooting the code.

 

 

 

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.