Children of the information age are doomed to have the worst handwriting just for lack of use if nothing more. But some students at Olin College harnessed technology to find a solution to that problem. Meet Herald, a CNC machine that can produce beautiful calligraphy.

The machine uses a gantry to move the writing tip along the X and Y axes. The flexible-nib calligraphy pen is mounted on a sprocket which rotates the tip onto the writing surface, taking care of the third axis. The rig was beautifully rendered from their CAD drawings, then tweaked to ensure the smoothest motion possible before the quintet of Sophomores began the physical build.

The drive hardware is very simple yet it produces great results. It uses an Arduino along with three stepper motor drivers. There are also limiting switches to protect the hardware from runaway code. The software interface designed by the team lets the user cut and paste their text, and select a font, font size, alignment, etc. It then converts the text to G-code and pushes it to the Arduino where the GRBL package takes care of business.

Don’t miss the device in action, writing out a [Langston Hughes] work in the clip after the break.

Variations II of Variations II is a kinetic sculpture inspired by John Cage’s Variations series.

Cage’s Variations II is a graphical composition that generates musical events using measurements of distance between dots and lines on a piece of paper.

The instructions for the piece determine the behavior of rotating panels and images synchronized to be projected onto the sculpture. Motors drive the rotation of the panels, and are used as a sound source for the audio portion of this piece.

The artist Jay Kim has used C/C++,  Arduino,  MaxMSP/Jitter and some stepper motor to create his sculpture.

Watch the video.

Via:[Synthopia]

Moppy is a musical floppy controller program. By using an Arduino UNO as a translator, you can command an array of floppy drives with a musical keyboard. The head on each floppy drive is controlled by a stepper motor which will put out sounds when driven at the right frequency.

Here is a link to the Moppy project page.

Enjoy your musical floppy drives!

Via:[Hackaday]

Get ready to join a band. Just follow the guide over at the Moppy project page and you’ll have your very own floppy drive instrument.

The name is a mashup between Musical and Floppy. By using an Arduino UNO as a translator, you can command an array of floppy drives with a musical keyboard (think piano). The head on each floppy drive is controlled by a stepper motor which will put out some sweet sounds if driven at just the right frequency. The lower notes tend to fair a bit better than the high range. One great example of this is the Imperial March theme as heard after the break.

Once you get the base system up and running, it’s time to think of some alternate interfaces. Sure, you can obvious things like toy keyboards. But wouldn’t it be more fun to make it fruit controlled?