And next up... I've also been following this one for a while and is another of my favourite projects out there. Lee O'Donnell aka Bassmaker has this great hack of a cheap Chinese import Melodeon that he's dropped an Arduino into along with buttons and a pressure sensor to make a fun little instrument.
Lee also has some excellent pictures showing off the design and the electronics. It's just a little bit of a shame that the source code isn't also posted. Here's some pictures of the construction:
I'm not going to comment more than this as Lee has done such a good job on his site, but here are the YouTube links of it in action.
Lee also has a cracking project explaining his SD Card Midi sample player that generates the fantastic sounds from this instrument. I'll probably blog on that separately later, but check it out!
Another New Year's resolution - there's quite a few interesting musical instrument projects and technology hacks that I have been following a looking at for a while. One of the things that I wanted to do with this blog was to start to highlight the ones that I've seen that are really cool. Last week I updated on the interesting Hurdy-Gurdy projects I'd seen, this week it's time to point out one of the first projects I saw and was an early inspiration for the Arduino.
This is still one of my favourite projects. The Ocarduina. I came across this on the Mountain Ocarina forum, I think after my wife saying that these little instruments were getting some ground vs. learning on the recorder and I'd had a look at one of the original iOS cool apps from Smule.
This is just such a fantastic project enhanced even more by Nephiel talking about it on the forum as he goes through the development and putting videos up on YouTube.
Here's the first prototype demo:
And then a few more as the project evolves - see how the micro-switches have been changed to thumb-tacks and are using capacitive sense instead which allows some additional effects such as note slide-off.
Playing some scales:
Playing Cumberland Crew
And Tam Lin
And finally the finished concept packaged up into a tiny little box... what a great electronic musical instrument!
Finally after a long time waiting and multiple delays the BareConductive board has arrived. I saw this on Kickstarter just a little too late to get in and so had to be content with one of the first pre-order batches. The packaging and product looks great. Also, according to my eldest daughter it's the first day of Autumn today, so I think it might just be legitimate to start considering getting the soldering iron out again and start on the winter projects when the clocks go back.
And here are some more pictures of what arrived:
I've got a couple of ideas for this board, which I've been thinking about since I ordered it. It's got an Atmel ATMega32U4 is pin-compatible with Arduino boards and most notably as it has the VS1053B audio processing board that I have been playing around with previously integrated along with a MPR121 capacitive touch sensor which should allow some interesting applications. They've also made the battery faff a bit less faff with a LiPo recharging circuit built in and 5V supply.
I love some of the ideas on the BareConductive site, particularly the Boombox Kit.
