Techno Music Goes Analog with Graham Gunning’s Rube Goldberg-Style Vinyl Tower
Utilizing an array of ingenious techniques, Graham Dunning masterfully creates entire musical compositions on a single revolving turntable.
piezo
Spikenzie Labs at Maker Faire Bay Area
At Maker Faire Bay Area I took some time to jam out with the folks from Spikenzie.
Build a Basic Infrared Motion Alarm with Weekend Projects
Build a motion-sensing alarm by combining a few common components: an Arduino, a PIR sensor, a piezo buzzer, and a breadboard. All you need is some jumper wire to connect them all, and the software to run it.
Open Music Labs on Piezos
Here’s a tutorial from Open Music Labs on piezo transducers.
Drum Controller Parts Harvesting
Today’s dumpscore included a Guitar Hero drum controller. I don’t have any use for it as a controller at this time, but I’ve been curious what is inside this category of devices. There were also about a half dozen guitar controllers for various game systems, but I wasn’t as interested in those today.
When I got home, I cleared off the table and grabbed a screwdriver. A half hour later, I had a nice neat pile of the electronic parts, and the rest of it was stashed away in the recycle bin. There was some neat telescoping tube in the stand, but I don’t have an immediate use for that stuff, and don’t have enough of it to create a storage category for future use.
Tin can contact microphones
If you’re into lo-fi sound, this is a pretty cool trick. What’s more, it’s super easy to DIY. If you’re as busy as I am, though, and you still want to experiment with a tin can mic, it’s hard to argue with the $7 price tag on these from the guys who run getlofi.com. I like the fact that they leave the original labels in place, and that they use 1/4″ jacks. It would also appear that they have some clever trick for resealing the empty can in a good-looking way. At first I thought they were actually using a can sealer to close them back up, but close inspection of the photographs makes me think they probably open them with a side-opening can opener (Wikipedia) and then glue or solder the original lids back in place. Still cool, though.
Bassdll, a sound library for Arduino
Drew Crawford made this excellent-sounding piezo speaker sound library for the Arduino. A demonstration of the library in action starts at 3 minutes into the above video, and the library can be downloaded from his code repository.
