Hasta La Gadget!

It may not look like much, but Dentaku’s tiny board lets you follow in the footsteps of Leo Fender, Antonio Stradivari, Ikutaro Kakehashi and other musical instrument makers. It’s called the Ototo, and it’s a small synthesizer that can be activated by any conductive material and tweaked by a variety of inputs.

The Ototo is a lot like the MaKey MaKey, except it specializes in making music. It has 12 capacitive touch keys that you can activate with your fingers or any other conductive material. It also has four inputs for its sensors. One input modifies the volume, one changes the pitch and the other two sensors tweak the “texture” of the synth. At launch, Dentaku will offer seven types of sensors. There’s a knob, a slider, a joystick, a force-sensitive button, a touch-sensitive strip, a light sensor and a breath sensor.

Augmenting the synth with one or more sensors lets you make a variety of instruments, from a cardboard saxophone to a drum made of human heads. I mean live human heads. I mean living human drums. With their heads still attached – you know what I mean. Don’t kill people.

Ototo is powered by two AA batteries or via micro-USB. Speaking of which, you can also use the synthesizer as a MIDI controller over USB.

Jam with your browser and head to Kickstarter for more info on Ototo. A pledge of at least £45 (~$73 USD) gets you an Ototo board.

When my son was really small I probably pushed him 1000 miles in his red and yellow Little Tykes Cozy Coupe. I also flopped over the top of that little car a few times when the front wheels randomly stopped working at speed. If you have fond memories of these little toy cars, you might want to check out the street-legal version you can ride in now that you are grown up.

The car was made by a guy named John Bitmead. The builder says that he spent 1000 hours and about £4,000 (~$6m500 USD) on the project. The car started out as a Daewoo Matiz, has an 800cc engine inside of it and is street legal. It has a top speed of 70mph.

I don’t see how this thing can actually be street legal. I wouldn’t want to be in an accident in this thing, even though it has airbags. Check out the videos to see the car in action.

[via Daily Mail and Geekologie]

A growing number of establishments are accepting Bitcoin as payment. Now you can even use it to play arcade games. British company Liberty Games combined the cutting edge currency with the aging gaming platform to make a simple transaction hilariously complicated. The company used a Raspberry Pi and a PiFace add-on to make the payment interface.

Liberty Games first tried their Bitcoin payment mod on a pool table. After receiving good feedback for that mod, the company decided to apply it on an arcade machine.

The great thing about their method is that it doesn’t mess with the machine’s software, which means it can be performed on pretty much any coin-operated arcade game. Not that you should.

[via Gamefreaks]

3D printing can help you create prototypes or mockups quickly. Or should I say relatively quickly – it can take a 3D printer hours to print even moderately-sized objects. To speed things up, students from the Human-Computer Interaction Group at the Hasso Plattner Institute tested adding LEGO to their workflow.

Researchers Stefanie Mueller, Tobias Mohr, Kerstin Guenther, Johannes Frohnhofen and Patrick Baudisch call their project faBrickation. The idea is to print just the crucial parts of a prototype, then build the rest out of LEGO. To do that, they wrote a program called faBrickator, where they can open 3D models…

…and “Legofy” it at the press of a button.

Then they just mark the parts of the model that will be printed…

…and build the rest with LEGO using instructions generated by faBrickator.

They can also use faBrickator to go back to a 3D model, modify it and then print only the parts that were changed, once again saving time.

The group claims that on average, faBrickation lets them make prototypes nearly two and a half times faster than using 3D printing alone. I wonder if they can make a reverse faBrickation scanner, so laypeople can start making a “3d model” out of LEGO instead of a modeling software, scan that LEGO model then run the resulting model through faBrickation.

[via Hasso Plattner Institute via PSFK]

I’m sure you’ve seen videos of floppy disk drives rigged to play music. Simon Schoar took the hack to the next level with RumbleRail, a modular floppy jukebox that plays MIDI files loaded to its SD card slot. It’s run by an ATMega microcontroller, has a 128 x 64 LCD display and two RGB LEDs for each drive that light up in sync with the music. All of its parts are neatly arranged on a machined aluminum rail.

According to Simon, depending on the file extension of the selected MIDI files, RumbleRail will either map MIDI tracks to the drives, map MIDI channels to the drives or just play as many notes as possible at once. Here’s the RumbleRail playing the Pirates of the Caribbean theme song:

And here it is playing the Ghostbusters theme song in the dark, because it ain’t afraid of no ghost:

They sound like highly organized mosquitoes. Fire up Lynx and head to Simon’s website to find out how you can build your own RumbleRail.

[via DamnGeeky]