Blog Posts

Ranjit Bhatnagar created a stone sound sculpture that responds to the settling of its stones and the weather by playing sounds.  This beautiful sculpture uses sensors for pressure, humidity, temperature, and barometric pressure to collect data and send it to a drone synthesizer, making the sculpture feel alive with sound.

Ranjit posted a bit of technical information on the project over on the forum.

This video is a walkthrough of the sculpture.  You can hear the change in sounds the sculpture is generating while walking around it.

We published a video on with some tips on soldering header pins on to your Teensy board.

A couple of tips to remember when soldering header pins to your board:

1 – You MUST solder the pins.  Setting the Teensy on the header pins without completing the soldering will not work.

2 – Use a breadboard to keep the pins straight and stable when soldering

3 – Leave the soldering iron on the pad for a moment after you solder.  This will bring all the components – the pad, the header pin, and the solder up to the same temperature so they will cool together to form a proper molecular bond.

The team a Jen Lewin Studios created an amazing interactive LED art installation called The Pool that is best described as an environment of giant, concentric circles created from interactive pads.

The Pool uses thousands of LEDs driven by Teensy boards to create pools of light you can run and jump and play in.

This video shows the beautiful interactive nature of The Pool and Jen Lewin talks about her inspiration for the installation.

Aidan Lawrence made a video game music player featuring the real Sega Genesis sound chips.  If you’ve longed to hear retro video game music, this project is worth checking out.

Aidan has published a great write up of of the project including the challenges he faced and discoveries he made along the way.

The schematics and code are published on Git Hub so you can build your own.

John Van Strien and team have created an interactive light and sound responsive sculpture called PETT Plant.  

This beautiful work of art can be programmed custom animations from and Android app.  It also has a sound responsive mode where the color of each stem modulates like a rainbow graphic equalizer.

PETT Plant also comes pre-programmed with several brainwave entrainment sequences.  In entrainment mode, PETT Plant will pulsate at specific frequencies to help move you into brainwave states conducive to inducing sleep, meditation or increasing alertness.

This video shows the PETT Plant in action

Thomas Hudson and a group of people at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) have gotten into the Halloween spirit early with this freaky shaking haunted mansion.  The house is made of cardboard with some miniature skulls, bats, and cats laser cut out of plastic.  Thomas added lightning and sound effects as well as making the house shake.  This spooky house is an awesome prop to kick off the Halloween season.

This video shows the mansion in action

 

Thomas has made the code available on GitHub.

Leif Oddson built a MIDI controller that allows for up to 3 foot-switches and 2 expression pedals.  This is a nice DIY MIDI project.

Using FlowStone, a graphical programming language based on Ruby, he created a program to control the MIDI controller.

There is a good write up of the project, including the code, here.

 

 

 

 

Wolfgang Höhne submitted his video wall project that he recently made.  The field where his football club plays it can be difficult to know the score and time remaining.  Wolfgang created a video wall to display this information.  It’s remotely updated by the announcer to keep spectators informed on the game.  Not every field is equipped with large signboards to display match information.  This project is a great way to solve that problem.

There’s a good write up of the project, including the code, over on Hackster.io.

Sam Kristoff created an interactive tic-tac-toe game using and off the shelf game board.  

He has an excellent write up on the build process and also included the code.  The use of LEDs and the interactivity are great improvements to a standard game.

Ray Kampmeier designed a DMX shield. DMX is used for controlling lights.  The whole thing is the size of a DMX connector making for a compact shield.