We love the weird and crazy around here. If there is a healthy dose of tech that is even better. You might remember the Multi Mallet Automatic Drumming Instrument that we featured last year. They are adding robots and lots of smarts to the musical system they are making. The music sounds great and Expressive Machines Musical Instruments are going to open source the creations. Check out the Kickstarter page
Dan Stahlke has built this AVR Based Power Usage Logger which uses an SD card to store the power usage data. It is similar to the DIY Power Consumption Monitoring System we saw last week. After seeing some of the charts I really want one, Dan shows where you can see the hot water tank cycling on and off and a bunch of laundry loads. I think once you see
Merry Christmas everyone! I hope this holiday season finds you in good health and in the company of friends and family. Mauricio Martins has the Christmas spirit. He took a plain old acrylic tree and added some bling to it with some LEDs and a simple circuit. “For this hack, I used the following components that you can buy for less than 8 euros. MUJI Red Acrylic Christmas Tree Resistors:
If you play with MIDI instruments and have an Arduino kicking around, the micro Drum which is an Arduino Based MIDI Drum System might be of interest to you. It is currently under development and should be available soon. If you want to help out in the development of the device you are not too late since it is still evolving. Check out the gallery for more images of the
Monitoring how much power we use is getting quite popular, most of us have seen the Kill a Watt device before and there are also whole house versions of the Kill a Watt. If I ever get around to it I would like to build a whole house monitoring system that can show me some simple stats of power use, something like how much power was used today and in
This DIY Metal Hunting Robot uses some Parallax processing to hunt down metal objects while avoiding bumping into items in the way. “To avoid any collision with other objects (such as furniture), the robot uses an ultrasonic range detector (radar) as well as 2 side infrared range detectors. The radar, placed on top of the robot, searches the area infront of the moving robot for obstacles. If one is located
This Ruler Clock looks like it would have been tons of fun to build. It uses a few stepper motors that are driven by a motor shield that is connected to an Arduino. Nice thing about these small steppers that are used in this project is that they can be found for free everywhere you look. Next time you see one of those disposable $50 printers being tossed out because
