Blog Posts

Phillip Schuster built a handy little mult-tool for working on hardware.

This neat little gadget can do things like generate PWM or DAC signals, read serial output of your microcontroller project, as well as several other useful functions.  The design of the Little Helper was inspired by the iPod interface.  It’s custom touch wheel allows for fast one-handed operation.

The project is open source.  You can find the code on Github.

There is some additional discussion of the project on HackADay.

The folks over at Cirque have put together a kit for trackpad development.  This nifty little kit is Arduino based and includes everything you need to get going with trackpad development.

They have sample code, reference designs, and developer tools available over on GitHub.

vitormhenrique recently posted about his custom arcade machine over on the forum.  This is a great looking cabinet and it even lights up with LEDs when not in use. 

The forum post offers some more details about the build.  vitormhenrique has made the controller board public on OSH Park and is planning to make the plans and code available as well.

Brendan Ratliff created The Knobber, a tiny MIDI controller with precisely one knob and one button.  This compact design is pretty handy when you have limited space and you don’t need the many knobs your favorite controller offers.

Brendan’s website has a good write of the project and also offers the code he wrote.

 

Jan Godde put together this beautiful sensor box, primarily for controlling PureData, a programming language used for computer music and multimedia.

For the disks Jan hacked a couple of old hard drives for the motors and platters.  The disk movement is sensed by IR LEDs and phototransistors and using quadrature encoding.

This video is a good demo of the box in action

Travis Brown breathed some new life into an old amp by adding  a retrofitted display, a motorized volume knob, and improvements to the housing.

Years ago Travis got his hands on an old Ford Probe Audio Amp.  He got it working and improved the housing for it.  Years later he re-visited the amp and did a few upgrades on it, including a motorized potentiometer for volume control, a new housing, and a new display screen. His website has a great write up on the project.

Nomblr turned her dad’s Morse key from the 1950s into a USB keyboard.  This is a pretty impressive modernization of an old-time device.  It’s even more impressive that this was her first foray into working with electronics.

 

There is a bit of a write up on the project over on Hackaday.

The code for the project is posted on GitHub.

Devicer  published a video testing a project he did with LEDs reacting to line input into a Teensy Audio shield.  It looks like a beautiful project.

 

 

Djordje Milicevic built a beautiful finger drum machine (MIDI to a PC doing the drum sound synth).  The pads are velocity sensitive for different sound depending on how hard they’re played.

This video shows a great demo of this elegant machine in action

The project is open source.  You can find the code in Djordje’s GitHub repository.

 

Koka Nikoladze came up with a creative solution to house his fragile prototype – electronics in a jar (not to be confused with Whiskey in a Jar)

The project sends a midiNote 127 with the velocity 127 when you touch the metal pin by sensing capacitive touch.  When the prototype was done on a solderless breadboard it was a bit fragile.  Koka didn’t want to wait for a PCB to be made, so he spent $1.40 at IKEA on a jar.  He drilled a few holes in the top and made a secure enclosure for his project.