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]

Twitter is probably the most up-to-date source of both the most useless as well as the important issues of the day; it’s like a thousand free radio stations where some broadcast nothing but ads while the rest have schizophrenic DJs and reporters. So… it’s not like a radio station at all. But I still find this tweet-speaking radio to be an awesome mod.

The not-radio was made by Sean Hathaway, who calls his device “Volume and Noise.” It has a wooden case from an antique radio but its innards and display have been upgraded with equipment like a newer amplifier, an Arduino microcontroller and a meter that shows the number of tweets per minute.

It filters tweets based on user-defined search terms and then converts them to speech using synthetic voices. In the video below Volume and Noise is tuned in to political search terms. I like the addition of static and tuning sound effects.

I wonder if it would be possible to order it to make a voice command that tells the radio to save or mail a link to the tweet it just read. That way it would be even more useful.

[via MAKE]

A couple of weeks ago we saw a Kickstarter fundraiser for a desktop arcade machine based on the Raspberry Pi. It turns out that hacker and tinkerer Jeroen Domburg has already made a tinier, yet also functional machine based on the same computer.

Wow. So many wonderful features in such a tiny package. I think it’s as small, if not smaller, than the Space Invader cabinet we saw a while back, but this one runs MAME so it can run tons of classic (and not-so-classic) games. It has a transparent cabinet made from laser-cut acrylic, a 2.4″ LCD screen and an itty bitty OLED display up top that displays the logo of the game being played (if available). It runs on a Li-ion battery that can be recharged via USB.

This project is definitely not for beginners, but if you have the skills Domburg has posted a thorough step-by-step on his website.

[via TechCrunch]

Technology is quickly catching up to satisfy our nostalgia. We have modders making amalgams of old consoles, calculators that can run Pokémon and now this, a prime contender for Technabob’s non-existent app of the year awards – an app that lets Android devices run Windows 95 & 98 games.

The app is called Winulator, and it was made by a genius called Dan Aloni. Winulator implements “DirectX and Win32 calls”, i.e. it lets games run on the Android OS despite them being developed for the older Windows operating systems. But most of these games were made not just with a certain OS but also with certain hardware in mind, particularly Intel Pentium processors, and not the ARM processors found in today’s Android devices. Fortunately Winulator takes care of that as well. It can either compile as needed or “compile the entire binary before it runs.” In layman’s terms? StarCraft on your smartphone. Actually that’s a stupid setup but still. It’s possible.

Winulator isn’t finished yet, but Aloni is planning on releasing it via the Google Play market when it’s done. Meanwhile dig up your old installers and get to ripping.

[Winulator via Ubergizmo]

Modder Ben Heck has removed one of the few remaining advantages of videogame consoles over the PC master race: the analog stick. Heck sacrificed an Xbox 360 controller to make the W, A, S and D keys on his keyboard behave like the left stick on the controller, i.e. the harder he presses the keys, the faster his character moves in game. Or whatever “-er” is supposed to happen.

Aside from an Xbox 360 controller, Ben Heck also used magnets, Hall effect sensors and a microcontroller to complete the mod. He ends up with WASD keys that are much more useful in PC games that support gamepads. You can skip to about 10:00 in the video to see Heck test his modded keyboard:

If you already had your soldering spellbook and modding whatzits close at hand, head to Ben Heck’s website to grab the files and code you’ll need for the mod.