Planet Arduino

Yuval Tsur made this excellent game box comprised of four oversized LED-lit arcade buttons, as a gift to his son to celebrate the arrival of his little brother.

The box features both Simon and a reaction game where you must quickly press the button that lights up. In addition to gaming, the device can play the Super Mario Brothers theme, or react with light and sound to button presses in free play (or “baby brother”) mode.

Controlled by an Arduino Nano, the rest of electronics include an LCD display interface and a pair of 5W, 4? speakers. The project is constructed out of acrylic top and bottom faces — fastened together using long standoffs for extra strength — and MDF sidewalls decorated with printed paper.

More details on the music and game box can be found in Tsur’s write-up. From the looks of the video below, his son loved it!

Er13k was inspired to create an Arduino music box to go along with his girlfriend’s giant stuffed dog Tobias. This eventually morphed into something that not only plays songs on its own speaker, but also lights up a 3D-printed keyboard with LEDs. Perhaps its coolest feature, though, is that it includes an RCA output jack to show a cartoon representation of the plush toy on a CRT television.

When the AV output is active, the device pushes tunes through the TV’s speaker and displays 95×95 pixel drawings and simple animations. 

You can see it demonstrated in the video below, as well as some of the build process. On his “channel,” Tobias gets hungry, makes a drawing, and… becomes quite unsatisfied with his job.

Childlike imagination is a wonderful thing. The ability to give life to inanimate objects and to pretend how they’re living their own life is precious, and not for nothing a successful story line in many movies. With the harsh facts or adulthood and reality coming for all of us eventually, it’s nice to see when some people never fully lose that as they get older. Even better when two find each other in life, like [er13k] and his girlfriend, who enjoy to joke about all the mischief their giant dog-shaped plush toy [Tobias] might secretly get into in their absence. The good thing about growing up on the other hand is the advanced technical opportunities at one’s disposal, which gave the imagined personality an actual face, and have it live inside an old CRT screen.

The initial idea was to just build a little music box as a gift, which beeps out [er13k]’s girlfriend’s favorite song with an Arduino on a speaker he salvaged from an old radio. But as things tend to go when you’re on a roll, he decided to make the gift even more personal. The result is still that music box, built in a 3D-printed case with a little piano that lights up the notes it plays, but in addition the Arduino now also displays a cartoon version of [Tobias] through composite video on an old TV. You can see for yourself in the video after the break how he goes through the day gifting flowers and drawings, and ponders about work and alternative career plans — adult problems are clearly universal.

Sure, the music box sound is a bit one-dimensional, but it’s nevertheless a highly thoughtful gift idea that triumphs with a peak personalization factor. If [er13k] ever wants to change the sound though, maybe there’s some inspiration in this drum machine we’ve seen just a few weeks ago, or this pocket sampler.

Maker ‘pashiran’ purchased a music box which could be programmed with punch cards, but soon found that actually creating tunes this way by hand was exhausting. His solution was to automate the process, designing a fixture to punch the cards for him!

His new auto-programmer acts as a simple CNC machine, using stepper motors to roll cards into place and then move the punch head perpendicular to this motion to produce the correct note. The holes are punched out over and over with a DC motor, before being removed to play a beautiful tune on the mechanical music box. Computing power is provided by an Arduino Mega, while the user interface consists of an LCD display and an encoder. 

You can listen to 250 notes worth of “Be Our Guest” below, plus find more details on the project here.

As soon as [pashiran] laid eyes on his first hand-cranked music box, he knew he was in love. Then, he started punching the holes for his first ditty. As the repetitive stress of punching heated up his arm, his love cooled a bit. Annealed by the ups and downs of this experience, he decided to design a machine that can punch the holes automatically.

Soon, [pashiran] found his people — a community of music boxers that transform MIDI files to DXF format, which creates coordinates for CAD software. In [pashiran]’s music puncher, an Arduino MEGA takes a DXF file and bubble-sorts the jumble of x-coordinates. The MEGA conducts a trio of two stepper motors and DC motor. One stepper pushes the paper through on the x-axis, and the other moves the puncher head back and forth across the paper scroll as the y-axis. The DC motor moves the punch up and down.

Now, paired with [Martin] of [Wintergatan]’s method for chaining music box paper together, [pashiran] can write a prog-rock-length opus without fear of repetitive stress injury. And since he’s published the STL and INO files, now you can, too. Watch it punch and play 250 notes worth of “See My Vest” “Be Our Guest” after the break.

There’s more than one way to avoid manually punching all those holes. When [Wintergatan] was wrestling this problem, he inspired the hacker community to create a MIDI-to-laser-cut-stencil solution.

[Bokononestly] found a lil’ music box that plays Stairway to Heaven and decided those were just the kinds of dulcet tones he’d like to wake up to every morning. To each his own; I once woke up to Blind Melon’s “No Rain” every day for about six months. [Bokononestly] is still in the middle of this alarm clock project right now. One day soon, it will use a *duino to keep track of the music box’s revolutions and limit the alarm sound to one cycle of the melody.

[Bokononestly] decided to drive the crank of the music box with a geared DC motor from an electric screwdriver. After making some nice engineering drawings of the dimensions of both and mocking them up in CAD, he designed and printed a base plate to mount them on. A pair of custom pulleys mounted to the motor shaft and the crank arm transfer motion using the exact right rubber band for the job. You can’t discount the need for a hig bag ‘o rubber bands.
In order to count the revolutions, he put a wire in the path of the metal music box crank and used the body of the box as a switch. Check out the build video after the break and watch him prove it with the continuity function of a multimeter. A clever function that should at some point be substituted out for a leaf switch.

We’ve covered a lot of cool clock builds over the years, including one or two that run Linux. And say what you will about Stairway; it’s better than waking up to repeated slaps in the face.

[via r/engineering]