DIY Contact Microphones

My musical project Sylvisphere uses contact mics to get great sound out of – among other things – an old desktop lamp.

See how it is done after the break.

Crasy music machine

Father of a friend. He is russian but lives in Lofoten, Norway.

Reminds me of the childrens book Serafin.

This guy needs more views!

Bizarotron – teaser

Working on a tape loop player. It will be a while until it is working, but here is the mechanical parts. Beatiful, isn’t it?

Of course the name will not be “Bizarotron”. What kind of stupid name is that?

Love, E

Hamsterlife

Task: remote control a lot of hacked toy hamster to start, stop and light blue on command.

Given the number of hamsters to control (about 20) this was an opportunity to design my own Arduino based miniature microcontroller board.

Features:

• IR receiver
• H brigde motor driver for almost any motor voltage.
• 3x LED open drain drivers
• 7-30V power input w/battery monitoring
• a little prototyping area

[will add photo of schematics here]

I used Pad2Pad for the manufacturing and used their PCB design software which was realy easy to learn.

In future productions I will mostly use these cards to avoid extra cards, and reduce space and cost.

 

 

 

 

Design flaws found so far:

• Motor driver gates need pull downs to make sure they are all “off” when microcontroller outputs are three-stated.
• Motor drivers could with a slight change bee all galvanicaly isolated trough the optocouplers. This would be nice.
• The third LED output PWM colides with the IR-outputs timing so I have to choose between dimming LED3 or using IR input. This could be avoided by choosing another output pin for this driver.

 

How to import a bitmap image into autoCad

AutoCad is great but hopless when it comes to import other formats. I needed to vectorize a metal band logo for a project. Long story short:

1. Open the bitmap image in Inkscape (open source vector editor) and goto path – trace bitmap.

2. Select traces and do object – ungroup

3. Path Break Apart

4. Copy the traced vector path with ctrl+c

5. Open openOffice Draw and paste with ctrl+v. You have to copy this way instead of saving to a common format to avoid great quality loss.

6. Export to Windows Metafile.

7. In AutoCad goto Insert – Metafile. Voila!

“Lukta av penger” – The smell of Money

Had a few challenges from Grenland Friteater again for their new performance “Lukta av penger”.

Fake Nokia

I have hacked a old nokia to play “Seiren følger våre faner” very loud. It goes off in the pocket of an old man during a memorial speech to make a really akward situation. Used original speakers but trew out everything else and replaced it with a 9V battery and a microcontroller with Arduini Dumilanove bootloader . Sounds awsome/ful.

Well documented as allways

 

 

 

Inside Nokia

 

 

 

 

 

Factory Explotion

Test of urn light effect

Used 4 bootles of 8Bar pressurised air to blow wood chips out in the air during a factory explotion at the end of the performance. We were lucky enough to have four 1/2″ electro pneumatic ball valves lying around which saved us a lot of money. Three of the blow tanks are old fire extinguishers (painted black to avoid confusion) and a regular work shop compressor. It was a pain getting rid of all the leaks, but Locktite saved the day 🙂

Air cannons without the blow tube.

Light effect for glass urn

Challenge was simply that they needed a pulsation battery operated pulsation red light. I hacked out the led-plate of a cheap shit LED PAR light. Connected to 24V battery pack and controlled it with an Arduino and a darlington transistor.

 

Bomb factory

No real hack here. Just made some fake dynamite, igniters and timer for a guy making a furtilizer bomb.

Dynamite made of wood and paper.

Tinkarmas 2013 – Happy Jul!

Caterpillar puzzle for my todler:

Politicaly correct parents as we are. Homemade wooden toys we give. Wife (almost) came with the idea of a simple puzzle, like a car or caterpillar. I added the letters of his name to make it personal and to add an extra level of puzzle. It can be put together in any order but the one on the picture above is obviously the right one.

Architect drawings

CNC Gingerbread House:

CNC Mill with Home made softeware + electronics. It works!

Smooth!

First drawing!

The Machine. German quality.

Life’s hard. No time to blog. Yet time to brag 😉

The machine is professional, but bought it without electronics and software.

Electronics will be easy, I thought. It wasn’t. Made a simple version giving me aprox. 1/10 of the working-speed, but that’l do for most jobs anyway.

Programming will be fun, I thougt. I was right. It was. And it works.

No details ’cause no time. Doesn’t mather; Many better ways to do this already out there.

Love you,

Einar (tech dept)

The CMeTron

Got a request from the Brage Theater in Drammen / Norway. They wanted a weird contraption to visualize the dream of a 12 year old boy. A great invention that would change the world. They gave me a good budget and mostly free will so I ended up with this:

Helping out an Art student.

Hacked MP3 player started by a motion sensor.

Helped out a friend doing an art class project. They are making an installation with paper tubes hanging from a roof. When you walk into the tubes a loop should start playing. Solved this with an old motion sensor from an alarm system, connected to an Arduino, connected to the PLAY button of a hacked MP3 player. The play button is connected trough an opto coupler just in case. There are some timing concerns to control the MP3-player, like giving the MP3 player time to play the loop all the way trough without new play pulses, therefore the Arduino.

The whole hack took me about three hours and was made mostly out of trash lying around my workshop.

Good luck, Yngvild 🙂