Peter Blasser is a circuit bender who publishes his circuits by drawing them out. This makes a lot of sense and makes it easy to see how everything is laid out. Print them out and put them next to your blank circuit board and use wire wrap or solder stuff together to make these musical instruments. [via] – Link
I’m not really sure what this competition is all about, but it has something to do with LED’s and something to do with design. There are some really exciting concepts and artist descriptions on the site also. Interesting stuff. More info here.
My buddy and RepRap co-conspirator, Vik Olliver has been having a string of successes lately. The most recent success was in printing a tiny wine glass. It may seem trivial, but it demonstrates some very important features of his machine: it can do circles, it can make watertight components, and it can do certain overhangs without support material.
Yay!
Circuit bending is where you take old toys and turn them into musical instruments. Casperelectronics is one of my favorite circuit bending blogs and Pete Edwards, the author, just posted about a step sequencer he built out of a 555 and 4017 circuit. This looks really cool! – Link
Most kids wanted to be something like a fireman or an astronaut when they were growing up.
Me? I wanted to write music for videogames. Some of my favorite pieces of music came from my Commodore64 and Nintendo, classics that I still whistle whenever I find myself in an empty, echoey space.
Think about some of your early videogame experiences. How many themes can you remember? The classics are all accompanied by tunes that we remember to this day. Pacman. Zelda. Mario. Brilliant works defined as much by the restrictions of the “instrument” as by the imagination of their composer.
Well, life often takes you in different directions from your childhood dreams, but I’m lucky enough to get to play at mine as an adult. There’s a whole scene dedicated to writing music for these platforms, and I’ve been dying to dive in, but didn’t really know where to begin.
Luckily, GameBoy Genius over at 8bit collective has put together a great how-to for getting started with gameboy music, complete with a gameboy emulator and awesome tracking software for the gameboy itself. Here’s a sample of what you can create with it(mp3). The gameboy’s limitations gave it a sound very similar to the C64, which also holds a special place in my heart. There’s apparently a “getting started” guide for C64 music as well, guess what I’ll be checking out next?
We now have a subversion repository setup. Check it out here: svn.nycresistor.com It’s publically readable, and you need a username to commit changes. Since it’s publically readable, you’ll probably only want to put things in here that are GPL, CC, or otherwise free. If you have something proprietary and/or secret, it doesn’t really belong. It seems like most of our projects will be open source though which is awesome.
If you don’t know what subversion is, read more here. If enough people are interested, I can also give a quick tutorial on how to use it at a meeting or whenever really.
I’ve set it up initially to have 3 different areas:
/projects. this is where we store projects like the led cube stuff, the binary watch, etc. consider this the trunk.
/releases. when we get to a milestone in a project, we should copy all the files for that project to here to make an easy to reference ‘tag’
/users. create your own directory in here to play around with. your very own sandbox!
If you want an account to be able to make changes to it, please email me at [email protected] with your desired username and password. I’ll add you to the system and you can do whatever you feel like. Please be courteous of other people’s files though.
Viva la resistance.
Ok, this thing even has Arduino Clone stamped right on it and it’s $15. Yep, FIFTEEN BUCKS! True, it doesn’t have a usb connection on it but if you’ve got the tx/rx doohicky then you don’t need that anyway, right? – Link
Wow, I really want to get my hands on one of these and see how they tick!
This little guy is named Zeno. He appears to be a very capable robot with 28 different motors and a flexible face for communicating emotions.
The general public got their first real look at Zeno at Wired NextFest, and he appears to have created quite a buzz.
Check out this video of Zeno in action.
Isn’t his face creepily expressive?
Most robots of this kind are unfortunately just expensive toys, limited in what they can do and essentially just playing back sequences of movement previously recorded. Zeno aims to buck that trend by hooking up wirelessly to your computer, giving it a lot more thinking power. Couple that with the AI technology by Massive, the same team behind the AI used in The Lord of the Rings and lots more films, and you’ve got an a thinking, learning robot.
It sounds insanely cool – I really hope that it’s open to tinkering and hacking once they’re available.
I would love to make one of these for my house. A gigantic LED that is actually built using 12 real LED’s for the light and are a 20 to 1 scale. These LED’s were designed and built by Kei Yamamoto.
Its a bit expensive at $3000+sh but this thing seems to have every hand held tool you might need. – Link