Subwoofer Gets Arduino Brain Transplant

The Samsung PS-WTX500 subwoofer is designed to be used as part of a 5.1 channel home theater system, but not just any system. It contains the amplifiers for all the channels, but they’ll only function when the subwoofer is connected to the matching receiver. [Alejandro Zarate] figured there must be …read more

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Expansion Board Puts Spotify On The Amiga 500

No doubt some purists in the audience will call this one cheating, since this Amiga 500 from 1987 isn’t technically connecting to Spotify and playing the music by itself. But we also suspect those folks might be missing the point of a site called Hackaday. With all the hoops [Daniel …read more

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Media Streamer With E-Ink Display Keeps it Classy

The Logitech SqueezeBox was a device you hooked up to your stereo so you could stream music from a Network Attached Storage (NAS) box or your desktop computer over the network. That might not sound very exciting now, but when [Aaron Ciuffo] bought it back in 2006, it was a …read more

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How To Hack A Portable Bluetooth Speaker By Skipping The Bluetooth

Portable Bluetooth speakers have joined the club of ubiquitous personal electronics. What was once an expensive luxury is now widely accessible thanks to a prolific landscape of manufacturers mass producing speakers to fit every taste and budget. Some have even become branded promotional giveaway items. As a consequence, nowadays it’s …read more

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Organic Audio: Putting Carrots as Audio Couplers To The Test

If there’s one thing that gives us joy here at Hackaday it’s a story of audio silliness. There is a rich vein of dubious products aimed at audiophiles which just beg to be made fun of, and once in a while we oblige. But sometimes an odd piece of audio …read more

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A STM32 Tonewheel Organ Without A Single Tonewheel

The one thing you might be surprised not to find in [Laurent]’s beautiful tonewheel organ build is any tonewheels at all.

Tonewheels were an early way to produce electronic organ sounds: by spinning a toothed wheel at different frequencies and transcending the signal one way or another it was possible …read more

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Microphone Isolation Shield Is A Great IKEA Hack; Definitely Not a Xenomorph Egg

As any content creator knows, good audio is the key to maintaining an audience. Having a high quality microphone is a start, but it’s also necessary to reduce echoes and other unwanted noise. An isolation shield is key here, and [phico] has the low down on making your own.

The …read more

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InstaBeat Started Out Of Spite

[Tom] teaches electronics with this small programmable MP3 player, but it didn’t get its start as a teaching tool.

As all parents are sometimes required to do, [Tom] was acting as chauffeur for his daughter and his friends. When he played the Beatles one of his passengers informed him that …read more

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Use Your Earbud’s Media Controls on Your Laptop With This Useful Dongle

[David] sends in his very nicely designed “Thumpware Media Controller” that lets your mobile phone headphones control the media playback on your PC.

We realize that some PCs have support for the extra pins on cellphone earbuds, but at least some of us have experienced the frustration (however small) of …read more

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Worried About Bats in your Belfry? A Tale of Two Bat Detectors

As somebody who loves technology and wildlife and also needs to develop an old farmhouse, going down the bat detector rabbit hole was a journey hard to resist. Bats are ideal animals for hackers to monitor as they emit ultrasonic frequencies from their mouths and noses to communicate with each …read more

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