HOW TO – Make a Joule thief
“In the November 1999 issue of EPE (Everyday Practical Electronics), a small and intriguing circuit was published in the Ingenuity Unlimited section by Z. Kaparnik. It was a very small implementation of a typical transformer feedback single transistor invertor. The transformer was a standard ferrite bead with two windings wound on it and the circuit was using the high voltage pulse generated when the transistor turns off to light an LED from a single 1.5V battery. This page has two variations on the original design to use the simple circuit in a useful manner.” Link.
Pastelero has a great how to on controlling WinAmp via a serial port “Nowadays, winamp has full support to keyboard shortcuts. But some time, when winamp didn’t have this feature, I was thinking in some way to make a easy way to change music by simply pressing one button, it would make things faster and would help me to change music during games. So I decided to make a external control panel, to make it easier to change musics, volume up or down, toggle shuffle and many other features by pressing just one button. I found one winamp plugin that shows how to configure a external control using the Serial Port, being able to make 4 or 15 buttons control…” [
MAKE Flickr photo pool member Chris Mckenna writes “I was inspired by Mister Jalopy’s MAKE volume 04 
Excellent site documenting a homemade pipe organ – Maker Raphi writes “The following website describes the process of how I designed and am currently building a 5 stop, 5 rank, all wood pipe organ for my house. I’m not an organist and I can barely play piano but I love music, organs and woodworking. Add to that that I’m a mechanical engineer and you have all the ingredients for a project like this.” Thanks 
This MP3 player is made from an old Nintendo controller. The buttons were rewired and are used to control the music and select the songs. If you have an old controller and a busted up MP3 player, this looks like a fun mod to attempt. [
Nick writes “Here’s a great collection of homemade musical instruments and instrument mods from Dennis Havlena. Most are cheap and quick, and include sound samples. I particularly dug the simplified hurdy-gurdy.” 
Diy.sometemple writes “This is an extensive collection of automated and programmable musical instruments designed by the logos foundation. There are lots of photos and wiring schematics and the like. You can get lost on this site for hours.” 
