SATLLA-2B Nano-Satellite

We love seeing Teensy boards in use all over the place, from model rockets to jet-engine powered cars, but there’s something extra special about seeing them in space!

Imagine our joy when Ariel University’s Rony Ronen reached out to let us know that the Teensy 3.6 was being used as the main controller in their SATLLA-2B nanosatellite!

The 14×5×5cm sat transmits position and sensor data via amateur radio, which can be viewed on tinygs.com. More detail can be found on the iFixit assembly guide, which provides a comprehensive overview of the DIY satellite and its construction.

Luma-1: An Enhanced LM-1 Drum Machine

The Human League, Yazoo, Gary Numan, Giorgio Moroder, Devo, Prince…Roger Linn’s LM-1 drum machine helped create the signature sound of a huge number of artists in the 80s.

After receiving an original LM-1 as a gift, Joe Britt (of Danger Research/T-Mobile Sidekick fame) decided to create his own enhanced version, based on the original TTL and Zilog Z80 design, but with a Teensy 4.1 coprocessor.

The original hardware design is enhanced with RAM-based samples instead of ROM, allowing the selection of different sounds. The original front panel switches are replaced with potentiometers that enable panning or pitch control. After countless hours of reverse engineering, Joe discovered that Roger Linn lived just five minutes away, and the two became fast friends as they geeked out on the neo-retro project together. The Luma-1 is a work in progress, with new features like an LCD screen, MIDI, and a new metal chassis appearing over time. Read more about on Roger Linn’s web site, and check out a demo in the video below!

Kenwood VS-2 Voice Synthesizer Emulator

Kosmo turned to the trusty Teensy 3.2 and Audio Adaptor to craft a replacement for the out-of-production Kenwood VS-2 Voice Synthesizer, commonly used in HAM radio.

The VS-2 is a voice module for the Kenwood TS-850, TS-690, TS-450 and other transceivers, which announces frequency and other settings upon request, making it of particular utility to blind operators. WAV files can be loaded from SD for complete customization.

Guild of Thieves Game Emulator

Thomas Dettbarn, also know and dettus on the PJRC forums, created a highly portable interpreter for the series of text adventures published by UK video game developer Magnetic Scrolls.

With versions running on Ubuntu, Debian, OpenBSD, macOS, Windows, and beyond, Thomas appears to have tested the the claim that it can run on “anything with a C compiler” and got it running on a Teensy 4.0.

The below shows the game being output to a PC terminal as ANSI art over the Teensy’s USB serial. Compiled firmware can be found in the forum thread, and a hex editor can be used to modify the command line parameters specified within the file, based on the interpreter’s instructions.

Lathe Digital Readout

John Knoll had added a set of iGaging DROs (Digital Read Outs) to his old manual lathe, but was starting to feel their limitations. They rely on coin cells and are too laggy for precision work.

Inspired by a video of a digital caliper being read by an Arduino, John went on to discover the Touch DRO project, which documented how to talk to several types of iGaging scales. This soon led to the creation of John’s own Teensy LC-based DIY DRO.

From spare parts, John soldered together a protoboard with two 7-segment 8-digit LED displays, two 4-character 14-segment displays, a shift register with 8 LEDs connected, a 4×6 button keypad for input, and a piezo buzzer for audio feedback. John then developed custom firmware and a nice enclosure, and is very pleased with the improvements over the prior budget system. Read more, plus find the source in the original forum thread.

Infrared Mirror

The human eye is an amazing piece of hardware, and various tricks and exploits are used every day to create such illusions as movies and Persistence-of-Vision (POV) displays.

Unlike vampire bats and mosquitos, however, the human eye lacks the ability to see infrared light — that area of the spectrum beyond human-visible red but before microwaves. SugarBombs sets about rectifying this oversight (or should that be undersight?) in the construction of our eyeballs with his Teensy-powered InfraredMirror project.

The device is based around a Melexis MLX90640 far infrared thermal sensor array, which provides a 32×24 “image” of thermal data, in a similar fashion to a (very low-resolution) typical camera sensor, but in the infrared spectrum. This data is then displayed on similarly low-res LED matrix, effectively reflecting the radiation data, or “heat”, in a similar manner to a traditional mirror. Firmware, STLs, and more can be found in the project’s GitHub repo.

Gamepad to Touch Screen Converter

Mobile gaming is quite popular, but touchscreen input is often less intuitive and precise than traditional controllers. Sinsid created their TUBG: Teensy Unknown Battleground project for a controller could be used to emulate those touch events!

Sinsid discovered that both iOS and Android support external touch devices, so rather than using an emulator or modded version of the game, a solution emerged that leveraged the Teensy 3.6’s USB Host to intercept controller inputs, then translate them into touch events as if the player were using the screen directly. After figuring out some power and cable issues, Sinsid was able to get a standard Xbox 360 Wireless Controller working well as a touch input, as shown in the video below. Numerous issues prevent use for a complicated shooter like PUBG on iOS, but a second version of the project with an LCD display and the ability to load configurations from a microSD card looks like a promising evolution.

Teensy, Arduino Due and Sensors Carrier Board

Sometimes you need an Arduino for a project, and sometimes you need a Teensy — but why not both? 1bit created this Teensy/Due-ette Carrier Board to house a Teensy 3.2 and an Arduino Due (or Mega 2560), connected via I2C, plus a whole bunch of other stuff!

In addition to the two aforementioned MCUs, the Due-ette contains two A4988 stepper motor drivers, a socket for an ESP8266, two RS-485 drivers, two ADS1115 16-bit, 4-channel ADCs, a WIZnet W5100 Ethernet controller, and two HX711 Load Cell Amplifiers. It can be used for a peristaltic pump as well as all manner of other applications.

MIDI Bass Guitar

We see a lot of Teensy projects that bring the noise, but how many bring the funk? While it’s hard to say for certain without audio proof to back it up, Lokki’s MIDI bass controller certainly looks capable of putting some serious stank on it.

This unique Teensy 3.6-based instrument gives the approximate appearance of a four-string bass guitar, but is in fact a (left-handed!) MIDI controller! In a manner similar to the Otamatone, long, thin, soft membrane potentiometers are used in place of strings for pitch, and a further four force-sensitive resistors enable additional keyboard expression (or…guitar expression as the case may be!). A joystick enables whammy-like pitch bending, and an accelerometer in the neck enables ancillary gestural control.

The Teensy’s USB host capabilities allow control of up to seven USB MIDI devices, as well as the embedding of a Keith McMillen K-Board mini keyboard controller for triggering samples. We’d love to hear some of the funk this thing may bring, but for now we can just look at the pictures as we put on our best stank faces and imagine.

Parallel Battery Charger

What do you do when you’ve got a pile of quality Panasonic NiMH batteries and power-hungry robots that need high-capacity charged packs?

If you’re the folks over at PDX Hackerspace, a community-focused collective in Portland, Oregon, you assemble them into bot-ready packs and design a Teensy-powered board to charge them!

Teensy monitors the ambient and internal battery temperatures in order to prevent over-charging, and appears to incorporate a piezo speaker to indicate charge completion or problems.