The September 2018 issue (#338) of Circuit Cellar shows building a “Channel Element” to replace crystal oscillator modules which are no longer available at specific frequencies.

Check out Circuit Cellar and pick up a copy of issue #338 for full build details!

Rolf Hut made an awesome Anti-Hug Hat, or personal space protector, for Burning Man this year.

The Dutch scientist wanted to explore working with Teensys and APA102 LEDs – and wanted a way to try to avoid the typical American hug at Burning Man, so he came up with the Anti-Hug Hat.  The hat has acoustic distance sensors around it an when an object (like a person) gets too close, the ring of LEDs around the hat change from green to orange to red.

Rattus_Metallum made a cool DIY MIDI foot controller.

He needed something to control scripted chord progressions in Dreamfoot, an app for free-floating synth pad accompaniment and was inspired by the iRig BlueBoard, but wanted to dumb it down a bit.  He made use of a Teensy 3.2 microcontroller to interpret the switches and send MIDI data over USB. The code for the Teensy was posted by Liam Lacey at Ask.Aduio.

Alexander “Wolf” Griffen designed and built Squidartha, a beautiful interactive burn-bot for Burning Man.

In response to Burning Man Arts request for proposals for Burn-bots to be displayed in The Man Pavillion, Wolf came up with the oceanic themed Squidartha.  He was inspired by the intelligence and curiosity of the squid he’s seen while scuba diving.

The 6’6″ tall sculpture features strips of programable LEDs with nine animation patterns driven by a Teensy 3.2 and the OctoWS2811 library.  It included a control panel of 6 buttons for people to interact with the art with each of the buttons activating a different programming sequence.

Matthew Varas made an impressive GIF Playing LED top hat.

The project was inspired by a robotics competition.  Matthew is a mentor for the team an wanted show how to have some fun with engineering.  The hat uses 4 flexible 16×16 RGB LED panels, a Teensy 3.6, other miscellaneous parts, and LOTS of hot glue.

This imugr gallery has a pretty good write up on the assembly process.

Code for the project is available on GitHub.

Max Elliot was part of Unfolding Humanity, an amazing art installation at Burning Man this year.

This project was built by a team at the San Diego Geometry Lab.  The sculpture is 10′ tall and unfolds to 40′ wide.  It features 26 Teensy 3.2s with OctoWS2811 adapters and NRF24L01 radios.  Mirrors on the inside of the structure create a kaleidoscopic effect.

 

Sebastian Tomczak of Little-Scale, put together this nifty little clockable low frequency oscillator (LFO) with 16 outputs and various divisions, shapes, and phases

This is the prototype of the project

Robert Archer has made an amazingly realistic 737-300 flight sim based on the IXEG 733 and X-Plane

Many Teensy’s are used in this build to preform various functions from simple switch inputs and stepper driver signals to more complex ARINC 429 data output.  This incredible flight simulator is controlled with only 1 PC with 40 USB devices and two 50″ 4k TVs!

Robert has some great videos of the flight sim in action on his You Tube channel, including videos like this one showing a behind the scene look at the sim

This video shows Robert on the sim flying from Las Vegas to Santa Barbara.  It’s hard to believe it’s not a real flight! It’s a long video, but the take off and landing are pretty cool to watch.

 

Chris Rees has made the Megapixel Controller, a DIY pixel controller.

The MegaPixel  is a DMX controller host board.  It features 8 SPI feeds supporting up 32 universes or 5,440 pixels at at least 40 frames per second.  This controller is a great tool for your holiday light show,  LED stage shows, and more.

Code for the project is available on GitHub

The PCBs are a being made available on the MegaPixel lighting website.

Here’s a great video of a holiday light show using the MegaPixel controller

Charlie Williams re-purposed pedals from a 1970s Vicount Bahia organ to turn them into a MIDI controller.

The vintage pedals were turned into controller using MIDI over USB or DIN-5 outputs and has some impressive capabilities.  It’s packaged up into a beautiful custom case making it easily portable.

It was covered by HackaDay here.  You can also read more about the project on this project page.

Code for the project has been published on GitHub.