Silencing a smartphone at night isn’t difficult, but if you have a landline, Arduino can help!

Before computer hacking/modding became accessible, the next best thing was to creatively explore the phone system via custom electronics. Though this pursuit, known as “phone phreaking,” has largely gone away, some people still have landlines. As “MolecularD” shows in this Instructables writeup, with a few components you can creatively trick your phone into not ringing on your end, while appearing to the caller to simply ring and ring as if no one is home.

In order to make it much more useful, MolecularD hooked up an Arduino Mega with a real-time clock module to turn the device on and off depending on the time of day. Now calls from phone solicitors, or “IRS agents” at 4 in the morning can be eliminated automatically. As noted, this may or may not be legal where you live, so attempt it at your own risk!

Using a couple Arduinos, a team of Makers at a recent McHacks 24-hour hackathon developed a speech-to-sign language automaton.

Alex Foley, along with Clive Chan, Colin Daly, and Wilson Wu, wanted to make a tool to help with translation between oral and sign languages. What they came up with was an amazing animatronic setup that can listen to speech via a computer interface, and then translate it into sign language.

This device takes the form of two 3D-printed hands, which are controlled by servos and a pair Arduino Unos. In addition to speech translation, the setup can sense hand motions using Leap Motion’s API, allowing it to mirror a person’s gestures.

You can read about the development process in Foley’s Medium write-up, including their first attempt at control using a single Mega board.

After he’d just finished a project using RGB LEDs, Imgur user nolobot’s brother mentioned he needed a new computer desk. Most people would probably just let their brother buy one, others would make something out of wood, but nolobot instead decided to create something truly amazing using more than 1,200 WS2812 RGB LED modules, an Arduino Mega, aluminum extrusion, and translucent polycarbonate.

The Mega controls these LEDs with the FastLED library, which are sandwiched between a base piece of plywood and a strip of polycarbonate using custom spacers. This diffuses the light nicely, allowing for beautiful light animations directly on the desk’s surface.

You can find more on this awesome build on the project’s Imgur page!

In today’s digital era, we almost take for granted that all our information is saved and backed up, be it on our local drives or in the cloud — whether automatically, manually, or via some other service.  For information from decades past, that isn’t always the case, and recovery can be a dicey process.  Despite the tricky challenges, the team at [Museo dell’Informatica Funzionante] and [mera400.pl], as well as researchers and scientists from various museums, institutions, and more all came together in the attempt to recover the Polish CROOK operating system believed to be stored on five magnetic tapes.

Originally stored at the Warsaw Museum of Technology, the tapes were ideally preserved, but — despite some preliminary test prep — the museum’s tape reader kept hanging at the 800 BPI NRZI encoded header, even though the rest of the tape was 1600 BPI phase encoding. Some head scratching later, the team decided to crack open their Qualstar 1052 tape reader and attempt to read the data directly off the circuits themselves!!

Using an Arduino Mega as a sampling device and the tape in test mode, the team were able to read the tapes, but the header remained inscrutable and accompanied by errors in the rest of the data. Promising nonetheless!

Switching gears, the decision was made to use a logic analyzer to read the tapes and use software to decode the data. While they waited for their new analyzer to ship, one of the team members, [Jacob Filipowicz] harnessed the power of Python to write a program called Nine Track Labs (pictured below) which would allow them to read any kind of magnetic tape, at any speed, BPI, and writing standard. Armed with the software and analyzer, the team was able to successfully recover the data from the tapes in its entirety without errors!

Among the data recovered, there were numerous versions of the CROOK operating system — allowing them to reproduce the OS’s development process, as well as hundreds of other files containing programs and tools hitherto believed to be lost. There was also a backup of a ‘live’ MERA-400 system with a binary CROOK-3 OS, ready to run in emulation. All things considered, the techno-archeological tour-de-force was a smashing success.

If — in your more modern travels — you need to recover an audio recording gone awry, know that you can retrieve that data with a hex editor.

In what is perhaps the most Arduino boards used together, 130 Arduino Nanos, (plus an Arduino Mega), 130 RFID readers, and 750 RGB LEDs power this interactive crossword puzzle.

As you might suspect, bringing a giant crossword puzzle to life was lot of work. If you’d like to know how much, you can see the process laid out in the video below. Like many great hacks, this project starts out with a lot of prep, making sure the mechanical pieces go together as they should. Everything is then wired and programmed, and on day six, it finally goes out the door, destined for the National Museum in Warsaw, Poland.

Each letter has an RFID tag. Under the table are custom made circuits with Arduino Nano, RFID reader, and WS2812B. There is 130 of those circuits and the are connected by I2C interface together to Arduino Mega 2560, which is the main brain. So basically, the table recognizes letters and takes proper actions.

• When there is no letter: LED are dimmed white
• When letter is good: LED are green
• When letter is bad: LED are red
• When whole word is completed: LED play colorful animation

The main controller (Arduino Mega) communicates with a PC via RS-232. This PC plays special graphic visualization on the wall. When the whole crossword is completed, the whole table begins doing disco + sound effects.

It’s quite a colorful display, and it looks like the kids playing with it in the “Anything Goes” exhibition love it! You can see more about this project in Robert Mordzon’s write-up.

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Heavy duty coffee makers are good for, well, making coffee. On the other hand, if you were to look at the frame without the preconception of what it can do, you might notice that there is space on top where equipment could be attached, and space on the bottom with a built-in heating pad on which to place an object… in other words, a perfect 3D printer frame!

Tropical Labs realized this, and turned the ordinary household appliance into a delta printer with three steppers for motion and another to feed the printing media. An Arduino Mega serves as the brains of the operation along with a popular RAMPS 1.4 shield.

Frame aside, it’s a neat mechanism, and definitely worth checking out. You can see more about the project on Hackaday.io.

If you want to play accordion via a MIDI interface, manufacturers such as Roland do make such a device. The downside is that they tend to be fairly expensive, as one would have to assume they are something of a specialty item.

Conversely, if you are able to get your hands on an accordion whose buttons and general movement work, but can’t actually produce good notes, you can build your own! This is just what developer and composer Brendan Vavra did, purchasing a broken instrument for $150 on eBay, then carefully disassembling the keys which were mapped to an Arduino Mega.

The setup also includes a Bluetooth transceiver module for sending MIDI signals wirelessly to a computer running music production software, as well as a barometric pressure sensor for adding dynamic expression using the accordion bellows.

As you can see in the video below, the result and his accordion skills are quite impressive! You can find more information on this project on its GitHub page and read New Atlas’ write-up here.