Category Archives: 2018 Hackaday Prize

This Synth Plays The Only Scale Everybody Knows

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There’s something common to every form of music. Nearly every musical tradition, from western art music, to Indonesian folk music makes use of a pentatonic scale. This is just a major scale without fourth and seventh scale degrees, or just playing the black keys on a piano.  It’s the one scale everybody knows, and forms the basis of every school of thought for music education. Noodling over the pentatonic scale is what all the cool guys do in Guitar Center. It’s absolutely the foundation of all music.

For their entry into the Hackaday Prize, [randomprojectlab] is building a synthesizer around …read more

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The Spirit Of The 80s Lives On In A MIDI Harmonica

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In the 1980s, there was a synthesizer that you could play like a harmonica. This device was called the Millioniser 2000. It utilized HIP (Harmonica In Principle) technology. The Millioniser 2000 was a breath controller wrapped in chrome-colored plastic embossed with its logo in an odd, pre-vaporwave aesthetic, and connected to a gray and green sheet metal enclosure loaded up with DIN jacks. The Millioniser 2000 is absolutely the pinnacle of late 70s, early 80s design philosophy. If it were painted brown, the Universe would implode.

Because of the rarity and downright weirdness of a harmonica synthesizer from the 80s, …read more

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The Incredible Judges Of The Hackaday Prize

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The time to enter The Hackaday Prize has ended, but that doesn’t mean we’re done with the world’s greatest hardware competition just yet. Over the past few months, we’ve gotten a sneak peek at over a thousand amazing projects, from Open Hardware to Human Computer Interfaces. This is a contest, though, and to decide the winner, we’re tapping some of the greats in the hardware world to judge these astonishing projects.

Below are just a preview of the judges in this year’s Hackaday Prize. We’re sending the judging sheets out to them, tallying the results, and in less than two …read more

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The Polyphonic Analog/Digital Synth Project

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[Matt Bradshaw]’s entry in the Hackaday Prize is Polymod, a modular digital synthesizer which combines the modularity of an analog synth with the power of a digital synth. Each module (LFO, Envelope Generator, Amplifier, etc.) are connected with audio cables to others and the result is processed digitally to create music.

The synth is built with a toy keyboard with each key having a tactile switch underneath it, contained inside a wooden case upcycled from a bookshelf found on the street. Each module is a series of potentiometers and I/O jacks with a wooden faceplate. The modules are connected to …read more

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Finally, An Open Source MIDI Foot Controller

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MIDI has been around for longer than most of the readers of Hackaday, and you can get off my lawn. In spite of this, MIDI is still commonly used in nearly every single aspect of musical performance, and there are a host of tools and applications to give MIDI control to a live performance. That said, if you want a MIDI foot controller, your best bet is probably something used from the late 90s, although Behringer makes an acceptable foot controller that doesn’t have a whole bunch of features. There is obviously a need for a feature packed, Open Source …read more

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Can You Build An Open Source Pocket Operator?

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Toys are now musical instruments. Or we’ll just say musical instruments are now toys. You can probably ascribe this recent phenomenon to Frooty Loops or whatever software the kids are using these days, but the truth is that it’s never been easier to lay down a beat. Just press the buttons on a pocket-sized computer.

One of the best examples of the playification of musical instruments is Pocket Operators from Teenage Engineering. They’re remarkable pieces of hardware, and really just a custom segment LCD and a few buttons. They also sound great and you can play real music with them. …read more

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Hacking Nature’s Musicians

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We just wrapped up the Musical Instrument Challenge in the Hackaday Prize, and for most projects that meant replicating sounds made by humans, or otherwise making musicians for humans. There’s more to music than just what can be made in a DAW, though; the world is surrounded by a soundscape, and you only need to take a walk in the country to hear it.

For her Hackaday Prize entry, [Kelly] is hacking nature’s musicians. She’s replicating the sounds of the rural countryside in transistors and PCBs. It’s an astonishing work of analog electronics, and it sounds awesome, too.

The most …read more

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An Open Controller For Woodwind Instruments

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Engineers, hackers, and makers can most certainly build a musical gadget of some kind. They’ll build synths, they’ll build aerophones, and they’ll take the idea of mercury delay line memory, two hydrophones, and a really long tube filled with water to build the most absurd delay in existence. One thing they can’t seem to do is build a woodwind MIDI controller. That’s where [J.M.] comes in. He’s created the Open Woodwind Project as an open and extensible interface that can play sax and clarinet while connected to a computer.

If you want to play MIDI, there are plenty of options …read more

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Laser Cut Cardboard Robot Construction Kit Eases Learning And Play

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It has never been easier to put a microcontroller and other electronics into a simple project, and that has tremendous learning potential. But when it comes to mechanical build elements like enclosures, frames, and connectors, things haven’t quite kept the same pace. It’s easier to source economical servos, motors, and microcontroller boards than it is to arrange for other robot parts that allow for cheap and accessible customization and experimentation.

That’s where [Andy Forest] comes in with the Laser Cut Cardboard Robot Construction Kit, which started at STEAMLabs, a non-profit community makerspace in Toronto. The design makes modular frames, enclosures, …read more

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Sonic Robots Don’t Play Instruments, They Are The Instruments

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[Moritz Simon Geist]’s experiences as both a classically trained musician and a robotics engineer is clearly what makes his Techno Music Robots project so stunningly executed. The robotic electronic music he has created involves no traditional instruments of any kind. Instead, the robots themselves are the instruments, and every sound comes from some kind of physical element.

A motor might smack a bit of metal, a hard drive arm might tap out a rhythm, and odder sounds come from stranger devices. If it’s technological and can make a sound, [Moritz Simon Geist] has probably carefully explored whether it can be …read more

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