A few weeks ago, we heard Pawel Zadrozniak’s computer hardware orchestra perform a cover of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Now, the Floppotron is back–this time with its own geeky rendition of the Pokémon theme song.

The Floppotron is comprised of 64 repurposed floppy disk drives, eight hard disks, and two scanners. Every column of floppy drives is connected to an 8-channel controller based on ATmega16 MCU. The higher the volume, the more drives are playing.

Meanwhile, the eight hard disks with a pair of 4-channel controllers act as percussion. The sound generated depends on the driving speed–the higher the frequency, the greater the pitch. Hard disks use a magnet and a coil to tilt the head. When voltage is supplied for long enough, the head speeds up and hits the bound making the “drum” sound.

To drive the coils, Zadrozniak says he employed a pair of push-pull outputs built using discrete SMD MOSFETs. Most of the tunes are made by the two scanners, both of which are connected to Arduino devices. Data is received over UART (USB-UART) and buffers messages to keep the music in time.

The host application is written in Python 2.7 and parses the language that is used to write note sequences and arrange tracks that go to a specific controller. You can read more about the Floppotron here, or just listen to the Pokémon anthem below!

When the Golf GTI and the Jetta GLI were born, Volkswagen packed both with turbocharged engines, precision performance, and a whole lot of vroom. But aside from their stylish exteriors, a rivalry between the vehicles was forged. And, what better way to settle this rivalry than with a massive RC car race on a custom, Tron-like track?

As part of their “Rival Road: GTI vs. GLI” virtual experience, Volkswagen built a giant 1,800 square-foot track equipped with illuminated walls, low-polygon-looking mountains, and nine Arduino-powered obstacles (connected to a laser-etched control panel) that are activated by viewers on Twitch. These barriers include everything from a turntable that spins the cars around, to whack-a-mole-style pillars that pop up randomly, to rumble strips.

From July 26-27th, fans can tune in to the live stream to support their favorite team and vote on the obstacles that’ll be raised from the track to thwart opponents. The RC Golf GTI and Jetta GLI vehicles will be operated by professional RC drivers Tanner Foust and Scott Speed.

Pretty sweet, right? Jalopnik had the chance to get a firsthand look at the project, where Volkswagen showed off everything from how it was made to how it works.

Graham and Sam worked together to create a robotic gripper controlled with a glove and strong enough to hold household items.

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The post Our Journey in Building a Glove-Controlled Robotic Gripper appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

[Pepijn de Vos] was excited to interact with the world’s most popular augmented reality pedometer, Pokemon Go, and was extremely disappointed to find that his Blackberry couldn’t run it. Still, as far as he could tell from behind his wall of obsolete technology, Pokemon Go is all about walking distractedly, being suspicious, and occasionally catching a Pokemon. That should be possible.

Not a stranger to hacking Pokemon on the Gameboy, [Pepijn] put together a plan. Using his TCPoke module, he took it a step further. Rather than just emulating the original gameboy trade signals over the internet, he hacked a Pokemon Red ROM with some custom Z80 assembly to add some features to the Cable Club in the game.

After some waiting for the delivery man to bring a flashable cartridge and along with some Arduino code, he could now translate the steps he took in the game to his steps in the real world. Well, mostly. He could pick the location where he would like to catch a Pokemon. The character stands there. Somewhere around 100m the game will trigger a random pokemon battle.

[Pepijn] is now no longer a social outcast, as you can see in the video after the break. On a simple trip to the grocery store he caught two Pokemon!

AR-Duo is a steampunk telepresence robot that shows off the skills and ingenuity of a school's metal shop.

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The post This Telepresence Robot from the 1800s Helps Promote Metal Shop appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

[Bruce Helsen] built this dual axis solar tracker as one of his final projects for school.

As can be experimentally verified in a very short timeframe, the sun moves across the sky. This is a particularly troublesome behavior for solar panels, which work best when the sun shines directly on them. Engineers soon realized that abstracting the sun away only works in physics class, and moved to the second best idea of tracking sun by moving the panel. Surprisingly, for larger installations the cost of adding tracking (and its maintenance) isn’t worth the gains, but for smaller, and especially urban, installations like [Bruce]’s it can still help.

[Bruce]’s build can be entirely sourced from eBay. The light direction is sensed via a very clever homemade directional light sensor. A 3D printer extruded cross profile sits inside an industrial lamp housing. The assembly divides the sky into four quadrants with a light-dependent resistor for each. By measuring the differences, the panel can point in the optimal direction.

The panel’s two axis are controlled with two cheap linear actuators. The brains are an Arduino glued to a large amount of solar support electronics and the online energy monitor component is covered by an ESP8266.

The construction works quite well. If you’d like to build one yourself the entire BOM, drawings, and code are provided on the instructables page.

Back in the day, stoners were content to sit around, toke on a joint, mellow out, and listen to the Grateful Dead or something. Nowadays, they practically need a degree in electrical engineering just to get high. [Beiherhund] sent us his VapeBox build. Like so many projects on Hackaday, we’re not going to make one ourselves, but we appreciate a well-done project.

First off, there’s a home-built induction heater. A 30A current sensor and switch-mode power supply regulate the amount of juice going to the coil that surrounds the heating chamber. [Beiherhund] discovered that brass doesn’t have enough internal resistance to heat up in an induction heater, so he built a stainless steel insert into the chamber. Optimal temperature is monitored from outside the chamber by a MLX90614 IR thermometer.

Fans, controlled by PWM, keep the box cool. Lights, an LCD, an HC-05 Bluetooth unit, and everything else are all tied to the obligatory Arduino that serves as the brains. A cell-phone application lets [Beiherhund] control all the functions remotely. (We’re guessing, just because he could.) It’s wrapped up in a nice acrylic case. The video, embedded below, starts with real details at 4:28.

Before you loyal Hackaday commenteers get on your high horses (tee-hee!) bear in mind that smoking dope is legal in a number of states in the USA, and that Hackaday has an international readership. We don’t encourage drug abuse or soldering in shorts and flip-flops.

Spinphony is a bike installation that was built in collaboration with 72andSunny‘s Google team and their Made with Code initiative, with hopes of inspiring teenage girls to take an interest in coding.

As its name would suggest, the project combines spinning (indoor cycling) and music with each bike representing a different instrument stem of a song.

For instance, bike one controls drums, bike two might control bass and so on. The way we made it all come together was to have the volume of each stem depend on the speed at which the bike was being pedaled (i.e. the slower the RPM the quieter the stem of the song and vice versa). This is where Arduino came into play.

The prototype is based on an Arduino Uno and uses two magnets, a reed switch, RPM values, and MIDI to produce some spincredible sounds. You can see it in action below!

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