Hasta La Gadget!

Despite the increasing number of robotic musical acts, I’m still always tickled by the idea of a band that does away with the human element, and puts robots in their rightful place – to entertain their masters. The latest robot musician – a mechanical bass-playing ‘bot.

Engineering student James McVay created the MechBass as his honors project at New Zealand’s Victoria University. The robot uses a set of four individual bass strings along with a motorized pick wheel to jam out its tunes.

A linear-motion system moves a pitch-shifter that frets the strings by applying pressure to them, and a servo-controlled damper mechanism can stop the strings from vibrating quickly. Optical pickups then capture the sounds, and send them to an audio circuit and amplifier.

The whole system is controlled using MIDI signals and an audio programming language called ChucK, so it can play pretty much any tune that can be played on a bass. A custom controller board using an ATMega328 processor acts as the bridge between the software and the hardware.

But don’t just take my word for how cool this thing is. Here’s a video clip of MechBass pounding out the intense bassline of Muse’s Hysteria.

While I don’t know if it’ll be replacing Flea in the Red Hot Chili Peppers anytime soon, I’m still totally impressed by MechBass’ musical talents.

Check out complete details on the build here (PDF).

[via Wimp]

I’ve seen some unusual gadgets over the years, but the iKazoo might be one of the most offbeat, yet intriguing devices I’ve seen in a while.

Designed by ogaco, the iKazoo is first and foremost a wireless controller which can be used for playing music with your iOS or Android device. It’s got a lip sensor, a full chromatic keyboard and even a flute built into it. But the device aspires to be much more than a virtual wind instrument, as it can not only detect touch and breath, but movement. This opens the controller up to other sorts of interactions, such as using it as a paintbrush, on-screen navigation or for controlling games.

When used for gaming, it can be used as a sort of joystick, or also as a unique control method for games that involve balancing objects, or spinning a wheel. Its makers envision a plethora of other uses ranging from a motion control for golf and tennis games to a personal fitness tracker to a voice recorder and even as a karaoke machine.

Inside the stick-like iKazoo is a sophisticated set of circuits including an Ardiuno compatible microcontroller, Bluetooth wireless networking, optical, shock and motion sensors, as well as a microphone, multitouch sensor, RGB LEDs and even a headphone jack. It sounds sort of like a Wii Remote on steroids.

While the promotional video for the iKazoo is a bit silly at times (gotta love the part with the guy looking through the microscope,) I can really see potential here. A wireless controller with so much functionality along with an Open Source development platform could be a dream for hackers and tinkerers, much like the Wii-mote and Kinect have been. At this point it appears that the iKazoo is in the prototype stages, but the company is already registering interest for preorders for the strange little gadget.

We’ve seen attempts at recreating video game racing in real life. For Artica and The Arcade Man, there’s no desire to preserve the illusion — they’ve jury-rigged two Sega Rally cabinets to control the strictly real-world racing experiences of RC cars. Their two-machine setup from the recent Codebits VI event in Portugal yanks the original arcade computing power in favor of an Arduino-powered system that maps the steering wheel and pedals to the tiny vehicles through a wireless Xbee link. The setup does make a nod to traditional video games through the cameras, however: drivers can pick either an arcade-style overhead camera or jump to a cabin-level view. The only true challenge during the build process was to find viable displays for the rigs, as the original CRTs proved too problematic for the retrofit. Some might consider it sacrilege to gut a classic cabinet for the sake of some RC action, but the end result is a racing experience that’s at once very familiar and yet surprisingly fresh. Spectators had better watch their feet, though — the competition might get fierce out there.

Continue reading Arduino project has Sega Rally cabinets steer RC cars: like the game with more bruised ankles (video)

Filed under: Gaming, Transportation

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Source: The Arcade Man

End-of-year engineering school projects often pique our interest for their creativity. It’s not every day that they can carry a bassline, however. James McVay’s robot project for his honors year at the Victoria University of Wellington, the supremely well-named MechBass, wouldn’t have much trouble keeping up with a favorite band. It centers on a custom, Arduino-compatible board that controls the plucking, fretting and damping of four strings to faithfully recreate bass guitar sounds from MIDI input. The design even accounts for the unwanted noises of actuators and motors, while virtually everything was either 3D-printed or laser-cut just for the task at hand. Sounds good? There’s more in the pipeline: an upcoming Swivel robot will experiment with different playing techniques, and McVay ultimately sees his work teaching us about robotic music’s interaction with human performers. For now, we’ll be happy with the video after the break and hope that MechBass takes requests.

Continue reading MechBass robot nails bass guitar sounds with Arduino and a stone cold groove (video)

Filed under: Robots, Alt

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Source: Hack A Day

When we visited BeatBots’ San Francisco headquarters a few days back, the company’s co-founder Marek Michalowski was a bit hush-hush when it came to discussing the future of Keepon, not saying much beyond alluding to upcoming updates for the move-busting little ‘bot. He was, however, more than happy to talk about hacking the beat-monitoring toy, something the company had in mind when it first designed the consumer-friendly toy. “We felt it was important to allow people to hack it and be able to do more things with the toy than it can do out of the box,” Michalowski told us.

The company left the toy’s I2C bus open, so interested parties can easily manipulate My Keepon by way of microcontrollers like Arduino and its ilk. We’ve already seen some crafty individuals get the robot to do their bidding, something that’s only likely to increase when Michalowski releases a guide for hacking My Keepon in the very near future. In the meantime, click through after the break to see the robotics PhD discuss Keepon hacks. A YouTube full of choreographed “Thriller” Keepon videos surely can’t be that far off.

Continue reading BeatBots co-founder Marek Michalowski encourages the world to hack Keepon (video)

Filed under: Robots

BeatBots co-founder Marek Michalowski encourages the world to hack Keepon (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Nov 2012 11:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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