MIDI Keyboard Teardown and Analysis
Here is a great article from Open Music Labs which details the teardown and design of an old-school MIDI keyboard.
Here is a great article from Open Music Labs which details the teardown and design of an old-school MIDI keyboard.
Right before the Christmas holidays, Norm Krim, a pioneer of transistor technology and the father of the CK722 PNP Germanium Junction Transistor, died. He was 98 years old. IEEE Spectrum has a nice little “In Memoriam” piece which even includes a shout-out to MAKE (Krim was an early champion of DIY electronics and pushed to market the CK722 to hobbyists in the early 1950s)
This geeky necklace, available in the Maker Shed, depicts an ASCII heart, as seen in countless email and text messages: <3! The pieces are laser-cut in Sterling silver, then hand soldered to silver tubes that hang from the 20" curb chain. The necklace has a high-shine finish and is treated to reduce tarnishing.
I love video projectors, and have used one instead of a traditional TV for almost 6 years now. The only serious drawback, in my experience, is the expense of the bulbs, and I expect that it will not be very long before full-color laser diode projector technology overcomes it. Red, green, and blue laser diodes are already accessible; the trick seems to be in scanning the beams in an economical and reliable way.
Cubelets are a robotic construction system from Modular Robotics. Using color coded cube modules, a maker can create a robot from snap together pieces that contain sensors, logic circuits, or “actions”. When attached together, the modules communicate via i/o built into the connector. Cubelets seem like they’d be the perfect introduction to robotics because you could easily get started creating robots without having to pick up a soldering iron.
Wannes Vermeulen created an iPad app to control a modded RC car, complete with a remote point-of-view camera: I used two servo motors attached to the original remote control of the car to adjust speed and steering. These are controlled by an Arduino Uno, which gets the accelerometer data from the iPad through a socket server on my laptop. I also fitted my old Android smartphone to the car, which uses an IPCam app to stream the video to the iPad. The “camera”, the iPad and the laptop are connected to the same Wi-Fi network to share their data.
Looking like something out of a Dr. Seuss story, the Trumstand from Pleiades System Design passively amplifies an iPhone’s built-in speaker using a large horn attached to a machined base.