What do you get if you meld a Raspberry Pi, a chiptune synthesizer, and a case that looks like an imaginary Kenback-2000? Well, if you are [Artifextron], you get the NTRON. Part Nintendo console, part chip tune synthesizer, and part objet d’art. You can see the device do its things in the video below. This […]
The Zune might have joined the portable media player game too late to ever really be competition for the iPod, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t pick up some devoted fans along the way. Some of them are still breathing new life into the device, such as [The Director of Legal Evil Emeritus] at the […]
Drums! You hit them, and they vibrate. It’s kind of fun. Piezoelectric elements can create electric current when they vibrate. [Will Dana] put two and two together to try and charge his phone on his YouTube channel WillsBuilds embedded below. It worked… about as well as you might expect. Which is to say: not very well. […]
The way to get into radio, and thence electronics, in the middle years of the last century, was to fire up a shortwave receiver and tune across the bands. In the days when every country worth its salt had a shortwave station, Cold War adversaries boomed propaganda across the airwaves, and even radio amateurs used […]
This should count as a hack: making music from a thing that should not sing. In this case, [SIROJU] is tickling the ivories with a Brushless DC motor, or BLDC. To listen to a performance, jump to 6:27 in the embedded video. This BLDC has a distinctly chip-tune like sound, not entirely unlike other projects […]
Over the years we’ve been entertained by an array of musical projects from [Look Mum No Computer], and his latest is no exception. It’s a tape delay, loop generator, and synth all in one. Confused? That’s what you get if you position a load of tape heads around a rotating disk with magnetic tape on […]
Strictly speaking, a Theremin uses a pair of antennae that act as capacitors in a specific R/C circuit. Looking at [aritrakdebnath2003]’s MIDI THEREMIN, we see it works differently, but it does play in the manner of the exotic radio instrument, so we suppose it can use the name. The MIDI THEREMIN is purely a MIDI […]
While we have nothing against other 1980s 8-bit machines, the Commodore 64 has always been something special. A case in point: another new instrument using the C-64 and its beloved SID chip. Not just new to retrocomputing, either, but new entirely. [Linus Åkesson] has invented the QWERTY Theremin, and there’s a Commodore at its core. […]
When Hackaday runs a contest, we see all manner of clever projects. But inevitably there are some we don’t see, because their builders didn’t manage to get them finished in time. [Park Frazer]’s phase-locked loop is one of them. The circuit is an all-discrete PLL that derives a 440kHz output from a 1Hz input, and […]
Posts on Hackaday sometimes trend a little bit retro, but rarely do we cover hacks that reach back into the Bronze Age. Still, when musician [Peter Pringle] put out a video detailing how he replicated an ancient Sumerian instrument, we couldn’t wait to dig in. The instrument in question is the “Golden Lyre of Ur”, […]