Tag Archives: DIY

cVert, a truly random MIDI controller

via Dangerous Prototypes

cVert, a truly random MIDI controller @ danny.makesthings.work

cVert is the result of an idea I’ve been kicking around for years, and took a few months of work to bring to fruition. The idea was to use a Geiger counter as a true random number generator to give a non-deterministic input for computer art or music. The result is a MIDI controller with a large amount of control removed – it plays a random musical note every time a radioactive decay is detected.

All files are available on GitHub.

Check out the video after the break.

DIY home made portable oscilloscope

via Dangerous Prototypes

An ATmega328 based portable home made oscilloscope with ADC from Creative Engineering:

It is basically a small scaled digital oscilloscope. It is capable of displaying all type of waveform like sine, triangular, square, etc. It’s bandwidth is above 1 MHz and input impedance is about 600K. The device is mainly using the ATmega328 micro-controller as the heart and is assisted by a high performance ADC (TLC5510) which is capable of taking up-to 20 mega samples per second and thus increasing the span of bandwidth which can be analyzed by our device. In addition to that, in-order to make the device portable Li-ion battery is used , which will be suitable to be fitted into a confined space.

See project details on Creative Engineering blog.

Check out the video after the break:

Building an ATmega 1284p based data logger

via Dangerous Prototypes

A detailed instructions of how to build an ATmega 1284p based data logger:

In this tutorial, a logger is built using a 3.3v Moteino MEGA with a 1284p CPU @ 16Mhz, w 4K eeprom,16K SRAM for variables & 128K program space. Considerably more than the 328’s 1K eeprom, 2K ram & 32K progmem. Also has a spare serial port for GPS/NEMA sensors.

See the full post on Underwater Arduino Data Loggers blog.

Experimental motor driver for CG-4 German equatorial mounts

via Dangerous Prototypes

Dilshan has published a new build:

This is an experimental stepper motor driver for Celestron CG-4 German equatorial mounts. This unit is functionally equivalent to the Celestron dual-axis motor driver, and we developed it as a replacement unit for the original Celestron driver.

See the full post on Dilshan Jayakody’s blog. Project files are available on GitHub.

Building a 12V DC MagSafe charger

via Dangerous Prototypes

Steve blogged about his 12V DC MagSafe charger built:

Now that I have a solar-powered 12V battery, how can I charge my laptop from it? An inverter would seem absurdly inefficient, converting from 12V DC to 110V AC just so I can connect my Apple charger and convert back to DC. It would work, but surely there’s some way to skip the cumbersome inverter and charge a MacBook Pro directly from DC? Newer Macs feature USB Type C power delivery, a common standard with readily available 12V DC chargers designed for automotive use. But my mid-2014 MBP uses Apple’s proprietary MagSafe 2 charging connector. In their infinite wisdom, Apple has never built a 12V DC automotive MagSafe 2 charger – only AC wall chargers. There are some questionable-looking 3rd-party solutions available, but I’d rather build my own.

More details at bigmessowires.com.