Electronics

Become the Next Jack Johnson with This Guitar AutoStrummer

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Fortunately for aspiring folk rock stars that lack strumming skill, Jacob Stambaugh designed a DIY guitar AutoStrummer.

We all know that people who can play guitar are very cool, but it takes a lot of dedication to practice to actually get good at it. It’s easy enough to play power chords for some punk rock head banging, but learning all of the finger positions for the real chords requires perseverance. Strumming is usually considered the easy part of playing the guitar, because you just need to make sure you’re hitting the right strings. But even that can be tricky if the strumming pattern is complex. Fortunately for aspiring folk rock stars that lack strumming skill, Jacob Stambaugh designed a DIY guitar AutoStrummer.

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Raspberry Pi Used to Build Beautiful Music Table

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Redditor Dtphantom used a Raspberry Pi to build this awesome “music table” that is reminiscent vintage stereo consoles.

Back before smartphones, video games, and even TVs, families would gather around the stereo to listen to music and radio dramas. Stereos from that era were often built into large pieces of furniture, called consoles. They would usually be the centerpiece of a room, in the same way that we mount our TVs as the focal point of living rooms today. Stereo consoles are rare now, since music players and speakers have become miniaturized. But some people still like to focus on the music, which is why Redditor Dtphantom used a Raspberry Pi to build this awesome “music table” that is reminiscent of those vintage stereo consoles.

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These DIY Smart Glasses Put an Arduboy in Front of Your Eyeballs

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Kevin Bates has been on a two-year quest to build smart glasses that are hacker and wallet friendly, and the Arduglasses are the result.

Google Glass will go down in history as the first pair of smart glasses to hit the consumer market and also one of the most infamous tech flops. They had some really impressive technology, but they were probably a bit ahead of their time when they first released in 2013. Privacy concerns combined with a high price tag ensured that they never really caught, but they did prove that the technology was feasible. Technically, you can still purchase an enterprise version of the Google Glass smart glasses, but nobody does. Kevin Bates has been on a quest to build smart glasses that were more hacker and wallet friendly, and the Arduglasses are the result.

This Quad-Screen Raspberry Pi Cyberdeck Is the Best Kind of Overkill

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Multi-monitor setups are commonplace among desktop computer users, but, with very few exceptions, manufacturers limit portable devices to just a single measly screen. There are a couple of dual-screen laptops on the market and there have been handful of cell phones with more than one screen, even going back to the dark ages of dumb phones. But Redditor Holistech must have laughed in the face of those devices when they built this crazy quad-screen Raspberry Pi cyberdeck, which is the best kind of overkill.

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The Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect is here

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It was back in January that we first introduced you to the Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect. The first Arduino board to include Raspberry Pi silicon. It’s been a roller coaster ride getting it to you, and enthusiasm during the wait has been incredibly encouraging. The wait, you’ll be glad to hear, is over.

The RP2040 Processor

Working with the Raspberry Pi Foundation is nothing short of a pleasure. The teams there make some incredible devices, and their first in-house silicon is no exception. These guys get it.

This system-on-a-chip is a 32-bit dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ microcontroller, clocked at 133MHz and is powerful enough to run TensorFlow Lite. It’s young, but proving to be incredibly popular with makers, as well as electronics manufacturers. It’s going to be incredibly exciting to see how the Arduino community reacts to it. We can only imagine what you guys can achieve with the extra features of the Nano RP2040 Connect board.

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Adafruit Designed an RP2040-Based Development Board Specifically for Custom Keyboards

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The fine folks at Adafruit have just designed a new RP2040-based development board that is perfect for custom keyboard builds, the KB2040.

To many people, computer keyboards are appliances and nothing more — like a toaster or an alarm clock. But there are a lot of us who take our keyboards very seriously. We care about the feel of our key switches and the layout of the keys. To accommodate our tastes, we can either purchase a purpose-built mechanical keyboard or build one ourselves. If you want to go the latter route, then you will need a microcontroller to monitor your keyboard matrix and send key presses to your computer. To make the new RP2040 microcontroller accessible to keyboard builders, Adafruit has designed a new development board with the Arduino Pro Micro form factor.

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Arduino-controlled Rubik’s cube chandelier solves itself

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Rubik’s cubes have been mystifying and frustrating people for more than 40 years now. According to Forbes, 450 million Rubik’s cubes had been sold by 2020. But based on our very scientific estimates, only a small fraction of those have been solved. To avoid that difficulty, Stuart Gorman gave his Rubik’s cube chandelier the ability to unscramble itself.

This large 3D-printed chandelier looks exactly like the iconic cube, except that each section is lit by LEDs instead of covered with a sticker. Those are WS2812B individually-addressable RGB LEDs controlled by an Arduino Mega board. People usually choose the Mega when they need a lot of I/O pins, but in this case Gorman picked the Mega because it has lots of RAM to work with. That RAM is necessary for handling the complexity of the Arduino code that the lamp is running.

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Digital to Analog Converters – An Introductory Tutorial

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Digital to Analog Conversion 101

The function of a digital to analog converter is to convert a sequence of digital bits (usually stored in some sort of register) into an analog signal. That is, a DAC takes a binary number and converts it an analog voltage that is proportional to the binary number. If we feed a DAC with different binary numbers in quick succession a complete analog waveform is created.

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