Musical festivals are fun and exciting. They are an opportunity for people to perform and show-off their art. The Boulevardia event held this June in Kansas City was one such event, where one of the interactive exhibits was a 12-foot guitar that could be played. [Chris Riebschlager] shares his experience making this instrument which was intended to welcome the visitors at the event.

The heart of this beautiful installation is a Bare Conductive board which is used to detect a touch on the strings. This information is sent over serial communication to a Raspberry Pi which then selects corresponding WAV files to be played. Additional arcade buttons enable the selection of playable chords from A through G, both major and minor and also give the option to put the guitar in either clean or dirty mode.

The simplicity of construction is amazing. The capacitive touch board is programmed using the Arduino IDE and the code is available as a Gist. The Raspberry Pi runs a Python script which makes the system behave like an actual guitar i.e. touching and holding the strings silences it while releasing the strings produces the relevant sound. The notes being played were exported guitar notes from Garage Band for better consistency.

The physical construction is composed of MDF and steel with the body and neck of the guitar milled on a CNC machine. Paint, finishing and custom decals give the finished project a rocking appearance. Check out the videos below for the fabrication process along with photos of the finished design.

This project is a great example of art enabled by technology and if you love guitars, then go ahead and check out Brian May’s Handmade Guitar.

An ISP dongle is a very common piece of equipment on a maker’s bench. However, its potential as a hackable device is generally overlooked. The USBASP has an ATmeg8L at its heart and [Robson] decided that this humble USB device could be used as an interface between his PC and a SNES Joypad.

A SNES controller required three pins to communicate with a host: clock, data and latch. In his hack, [Robson]  connects the controller to the ISP interface using a small DIY adaptor and programs the AVR using the V-USB library. V-USB is a software USB library for small microcontrollers and comes in pretty handy in this instance.

[Robson] does a pretty good job of documenting the entire process of creating the interface which includes the USB HID code as well as the SNES joypad serial protocol. His hack works on both Windows and Linux alike and the code is available on GitHub for download.

Simple implementation like this project are a great starting point for anyone looking to dip their toes in the DIY USB device pool. Veterans may find a complete DIY joystick more up their alley and will be inspired by some plastic techniques as well.

Fidget spinners are currently very popular, and if you get one you’ll certainly want to spin and spin, maybe thinking you’ll never put it down. Unfortunately, like Nikodem Bartnik, you’ll eventually get bored with this device. Perhaps setting it aside forever. However, as Bartnik puts it, “Spinner has to be spinned,” so he came up with a robotic device to do this for him.

The resulting robot consists of two small servos, along with two 3D-printed linkages, attached to a piece of wood. A spinner is also affixed to the same piece of wood with a bolt, which is spun by the servos under Arduino Uno control.

Check out Bartnik’s Instructables write-up to see how it was done, along with the code and STL files needed to create your own!

While initially developed for use in large factory processes, computer numeric control (CNC) machines have slowly made their way out of the factory and into the hands of virtually anyone who wants one. The versatility that these machines have in automating and manipulating a wide range of tools while at the same time maintaining a high degree of accuracy and repeatability is invaluable in any setting. As an illustration of how accessible CNC has become, [Arnab]’s drawing robot uses widely available tools and a CNC implementation virtually anyone could build on their own.

Based on an Arudino UNO and a special CNC-oriented shield, the drawing robot is able to execute G code for its artistic creations. The robot is capable of drawing on most flat surfaces, and can use almost any writing implement that will fit on the arm, from pencils to pens to brushes. Since the software and hardware are both open source, this makes for an ideal platform on which to build any other CNC machines as well.

In fact, CNC is used extensively in almost everything now, and are so common that it’s not unheard of to see things like 3D printers converted to CNC machines or CNC machines turned into 3D printers. The standards used are very well-known and adopted, so there’s almost no reason not to have a CNC machine of some sort lying around in a shop or hackerspace. There are even some art-based machines like this one that go much further beyond CNC itself, too.

When you see a plastic ruler, you wouldn’t normally assume it was destined to become part of a CNC plotter. Maker “lingib,” however, realized their potential to be combined to form plotter arms, in this case actuated by two stepper motors.

The resulting build can expand and contract the resulting shape, allowing a pen at the end point of the two sets of rulers to move back and forth across a piece of paper. Necessary spaces in the plot are provided by a micro servo that can lift the pen/ruler off of the writing surface.

The device is powered by an Arduino Uno, which controls the two NEMA 17 stepper motors via a pair of EasyDriver Modules. You can find more details about how to create one of these, including code and how the geometry behind it works, on its Instructables page.

Use Circuito.io to drag and drop different parts together. It will compute all the necessary additional items and give you a wiring diagram.

Read more on MAKE

The post Circuito.io Helps Beginners Assemble Electronic Projects appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

If you were sad that Codebender had bit the dust, cheer up. A site called codeanywhere has acquired the online Arduino development environment and brought it back to life. In addition to the main Codebender site, the edu and blocks sites are also back on the air.

Not only is this great news, but it also makes sense. The codeanywhere site is a development IDE in the cloud for many different programming languages. The downside? Well, all the people who said they’d be glad to pay to keep Codebender alive will get a chance to put their money where their mouth is.

Here’s an excerpt from Codebender’s blog:

First of all, codebender will mostly remain the same. It will continue to operate as a standalone service, so you don’t have to change the way you are currently using codebender. However, it will transition to a monthly subscription service. This means that you will be able to use it for free for 1 month (as a trial, beginning on June 1st, or for the first month after registration), and it will then cost $10/month to keep using it. This is the price to pay for keeping codebender alive and sustainable, and it’s a small one, really.

Secondly, Codeanywhere intends to keep adding more and more features, the same way we have been adding features, libraries, and board support in the past few years. So you can expect codebender to keep improving with time, much as it did until now.

We have to wonder how many people will pay $120 / year to do something they can do for free. Mbed has support from ARM and offers a free IDE. Maybe a better deal with Codebender would have been with Atmel or Arduino. Not that we are opposed to charging for services, but we imagine a lot of people will just use free tools unless they have a strong use case for using a cloud-based service.

We covered Codebender’s short-lived demise back in October of last year.

Computer vision has traditionally relied on an assortment of rather involved components. On the other hand, everything you need to do this complicated task is readily available on an Android phone. The clever setup seen in the video here uses a smartphone to capture and process images, then send out a signal over Bluetooth to tell which way the device needs to be adjusted in order to focus on a nearby face.

An HC-05 Bluetooth module receives this signal and passes it to two servo motors via an Arduino Nano, moving the phone left/right and up/down.

You can find the Arduino code for this project on CircuitDigest, and the Android Processing code can be downloaded there as a compressed folder.

Though time may be relative, unless you’re planning on doing a lot of space travel, slowing things down in real life is “notoriously” difficult. On the other hand, with carefully-coordinated vibrations and lighting, the “sLOMO” device is able to make objects such as a feather or plant appear to move in slow motion with the naked eye.

Inspired by Jeff Lieberman’s Slow Dance Frame, this project is made out of a readily available IKEA Ribba frame, and the object inside vibrates using an electromagnet. An Arduino Nano controls this magnet and pulses a double-row LED strip, in order to make the item appear to slow down, or even distort itself into multiple overlapping images.

Want to build your own? Check out the excellent write-up on Instructables, and see the magical frame in action below!

Instructables user [lingib] made a clever and inexpensive pen arm plotter that uses plastic rulers for arms. An inspiring sight for anyone without a bunch of robot parts lying around,

The electronics are straightforward, with an Arduino UNO and a pair of Easy Drivers to control NEMA17 stepper motors connected to robot wheels, which serve as hubs for the rulers. At the end of the arms, an SG90 micro servo raises and lowers the pen as commanded, shoving the whole pen assembly off the paper with its horn—an elegant solution to an age-old drawbot problem. He even wrote wrote a custom Processing program that allows him to control the plotter from his desktop

[lingib]’s experimented with different kinds of drawing machines, including a drum plotter (video after the break), a V-plotter, as well as a rolling drawbot.

You’ll find tons of Hackaday posts about all types of drawing machines, including vintage plotters, plotters for making circuit boards, and even one built out of cardboard.

…the aforementioned drum plotter…

[Thanks, Setvir]