Build a Better Music Interface: Railfans (as in Trains)
Railfans are building life-size, full-scale railroad cabs that look and function like the real thing, then projecting scenery onto their wall. And for music, you can hack their USB controller to turn it into a music / video / VJ controller, using either the Windows SDK (for hard coding) or a Mac app called junXion (for simple MIDI, useful with Max/MSP/Jitter, audio and VJ apps etc.) Aside from the train controller interface, you could use their I/O box to build any controller you wanted. There are other I/O boxes that use USB, but theirs has an unusual number of ins and outs, saving you basic stamp programming. And it’s also comparatively cheap. They also make bunches of custom controllers, keyboards, everything… Link.
Neat lamp a MAKE Flickr pool member made – the base and top are poplar, while the dowels are oak. I used very small dowels to hold the base together (you can barely see them as spots near the bottommost CD). The bottom two layers of the base are hollow, and there’s a piece of round plexiglass to hold everything in. The light is a standard cold cathode tube used for case modding. This thing is freakin’ heavy, since there’s over 200 CDs. 
The midiGun is a MIDI controller in a gun. Not a real gun, but one covered in slightly camp flouro green plastic, lots of knobs and switches, a crossfader on the bottom of the barrel, a laser sight and lots more, detailed on this chart. It’s designed using a Doepfer pocket electronics module to control DJ software. [
Very fun processing app – Drawing toy that produces parameterized organisms. Procedural animation allows the organisms to swim around in a virtual fluid environment interacting with each other. The project now interprets strokes made from a tablet pen. When a stroke is completed (or closed into a loop) it manifests an organism based on stroke length, speed, and pressure. While not exactly gesture recognition, it was a quick and dirty solution to what otherwise might have been a nightmare to develop (gesture recognition). [
Nice hack for duping slides- I started this because I have about 2000 35mm slides and nearly that many color negatives I’d like to convert to digital images, and many of them are 30 years old or more and starting to deteriorate. My first attempt involved purchasing a slide scanner from the-store-that-must-not-be-named, but it took like 3 to 4 minutes to prescan and then scan to file, and then it usually botched the exposure or the color balance. I realized that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life scanning slides in this manner, so I started thinking about other solutions…[
