MAKE author Tom Whitwell wrote this great piece on how to jump into the synth-building scene. The hardest part of DIY electronics is starting out. My first step was building a few guitar pedal kits and learning by reading the Beavis Audio site. Other people start with noisemaker kits like the Atari Punk Console or […]
Ben Light made these simple and elegant “Clamp Lamps” for his workshop. The wooden bases attach easily to the end of a bench or table with a simple C clamp, and have gooseneck attachments upon the ends of which one can attach all manner of objects, such as a lamp or magnifying glass. These could be great accessories for your Helping Hands or Panavise, but also have a nice clean look on their own.
If you haven’t visited the Maker Shed for a while, you’re in for a surprise! We’ve been working hard to make the site better looking and to improve your shopping experience.
Using a pulse sensor (now available in the Maker Shed) to translate into a drum beat is certainly possible. The pulse sensor can be plugged into the Arduino and then translated as MIDI data through the Arduino’s serial port. Check out this Arduino Playground page to learn more details. You can also take a look at this tutorial to familiarize yourself with the process. Once you’ve done this, the serial data can be used as an input for lots of different audio programs that accept MIDI.
Here’s a tutorial from Open Music Labs on piezo transducers.
Martin Klimas places paint upon a translucent material, underneath which is a speaker. When music is played, the carefully selected mixtures of paint explode from the surface, reaching upward and intertwining. Klimas captures these events photographically and mates each photo to the piece of music that created it (the one below is Kraftwerk’s “Transistor”).
If you’re looking for an interesting project for your DSLR camera, you might find the DIY Tilt-Shift lens from Flickr user Maciej Pietuszynski to be worthy of your weekend project time. Maciej’s version uses a shower head and rubber glove in addition to a 50mm/1.8 prime lens. If you’re comfortable cutting a pipe with a hacksaw and disassembling a perfectly good lens, you can pull off this build. The images a lens like this produces more than makes up for the time it takes to assemble.
