[Ross Fish], [Darcy Neal], [Ben Davis], and [Paul Stoffregen] created “the Monolith”, an interactive synth sculpture designed to showcase capabilities of the Teensy 3.6 microcontroller. The Monolith consists of a clear acrylic box covered in LED-lit arcade buttons. The forty buttons in front serve as an 8-step sequencer with five different voices, while touch sensors on the left…
The Apertus° open source cinema team will be running a Surface Mount Technology (SMT) workshop at Maker Faire Berlin this weekend in their AXIOM booth #121:
In the course of attending a lot of fairs and exhibitions, we’ve noticed that our cameras and components attract the attention of people from all walks of life. We’ve found that despite our reassurances, people discovering the world of Open Hardware tend to doubt their capabilities where soldering tiny components by hand is concerned.
This is why we hold Surface Mount Technology workshops – so that with a little confidence, the right tools and some initial guidance from members of our team, anyone can have great fun learning to make their own PCBs. The workshops are very popular and we have visitors designing pendants and earrings with colour LEDs and blinking patterns – which always creates a buzzing atmosphere.
apertus has shared the boards on OSH Park:
Teensy creator Paul Stoffregen has shared a new project on OSH Park:
The Monolith Synth Project needed to use a large number of these LED lit arcade buttons.
Dimming of the LEDs was required. Initially I considered using this Adafruit 16 Channel PWM board. But the LEDs in these buttons have integrated resistors which require 12 volts, so 16 transistor circuits and another board for reading the switches would have also been needed.
It uses the same PCA9685 chip for 12 bit PWM control on every LED, with mosfet drivers to handle 12V outputs, and also a MCP23017 chip to read the buttons. Every button has a discrete 1K pullup resistor (rather than using the higher impedance on-chip pullups) to help with use in the same cable bundles cross coupling to 12V PWM signals.
Four of these boards where used in the Monolith Synth project:
The project is featured in this Tested video:
Thanks to everyone that came to Bring-A-Hack last weekend after Maker Faire Bay Area! Here’s a gallery of photos:
People were quite impressed by this soldering handiwork by Mike Szczys of Hackaday:
Mike also did a great job tweeting about all the wonderful hacks such as this care-free robot:
2206 Bridgepointe Pkwy, San Mateo, CA 94404
Sunday, May 21st, 6pm to closing
Portland Mini Maker Faire made for a fantastic weekend at OMSI earlier this month. We’ve shared our favorite photos of the fun.
Thanks to everyone that visited our booth. It’s wonderful to meet our customers in person and hear about their projects!
Sergey Kiselev and his son stopped by our booth to show us projects they’ve created including this Intel Quark environmental sensors board.
People enjoyed seeing our full PCB panels in person and learning more about the manufacturing process. We’ll also have them on display at our open house on Open Hardware Summit eve next week.
Low Voltage Labs had a bunch of fun easy-to-solder kits:
Mark Keppinger created this blinky board kit for people to learn to solder at the faire:
Visit our photo album for more!
We look forward to meeting everyone this weekend at:
Portland Mini Maker Faire will run the gamut from demonstrations of 3D printing and robot welding, to knife forging, bee keeping, recycled skateboard jewelry, and much more.
1945 SE Water Ave, Portland, OR 97214
Portland Mini Maker Faire at OMSI showcases the amazing works of all kinds and ages of makers—anyone who is embracing the do-it-yourself (or do-it-together) spirit and wants to share their accomplishments with an appreciative audience.
The sheer variety of the more than 100 exhibits, most of them hands-on, will boggle the mind.
Video of highlights from last year:
Cathe Post wrote on Make blog about a previous year:
