Makers

One of the more interesting use cases for the Raspberry Pi is exploiting its DSP capabilities in interesting ways. There’s a lot of horsepower inside the Raspberry Pi, more than enough to do some very interesting things with audio, all while being powered by a small wall wart adapter. [Pierre] over on the Pure Data mailing list has a proof-of-concept working that uses the Raspi as a guitar effects processor. The results are very encouraging – [Pierre] is able to use his Raspi as a delay, pitch shifter, and of course a classic flanger, phaser, and chorus with a latency of about 16 ms.

There are a few steps necessary to get low latency with the Raspi’s audio interface. [Pierre] is running his Pi headless, and allocated more RAM to the CPU.

If you’d like to try this out for yourself, [Pierre] has a tutorial for setting up Pure Data with the Raspberry Pi. He’ll be updating his blog soon with more tutorials and verified USB audio interfaces later.

Check out the processor in action after the break.

Filed under: musical hacks, Raspberry Pi

With all the recent publicity surrounding guns, Mehdi Sadaghdar (and his eyebrows) of Electroboom decided it'd be a good idea to show the world how to build one, in the form of a coil gun.

Read the full article on MAKE

I case you missed the news late last week, O'Reilly Media made an important announcement: Maker Media, Inc. has been spun off as its own company. All parties involved are thrilled by this evolution of our business.

Read the full article on MAKE

This looks intriguing, the Paragon, an Arduino motor controller designed to be robust enough even to control an electric car, evidently designed to run a Power Racing Series car. The maker, Alex McLees, is a founding member of Madison, WI hackerspace Sector 67. [via PPPRS]Filed under: Arduino

Read the full article on MAKE

This week in the MAKE Flickr pool we saw...

Read the full article on MAKE

Instructables user Falkenberg posted process photos of converting a wall into a projection screen with a beautiful exposed brick frame. With the help of a friend who’s a professional painter, they stripped through the layers of paint, wallpaper, and plaster down to the brick wall and cleaned the bricks with [...]

Read the full article on MAKE

A few weeks ago, we caught wind of a very tiny, very inexpensive WiFi chip  TI is producing. Everything required of an Internet connection – TCP/IP stack, configuration utilities, and your WEP, WPA, and WPA2 security tools is included in a single tiny chip, making this a very cool device for an Internet-connected microcontroller project. There’s only one problem: TI put this chip in a really, really weird package, and there aren’t any breakout boards for it.

That is, until now. [Vince] was convinced to spend some time in Altium to design a breakout board for this tiny WiFi chip. Now, if you can get your hands on a sample of the CC3000 from TI, you can breadboard out a circuit with the help of [Vince]‘s design.

Included in [Vince]‘s git are the board files for this breakout board, schematics, and the necessary parts if anyone has the inclination to make an Eagle library. If anyone wants to spin a few of these boards and put them up on a Tindie Fundraiser, that’d be fine by us, and [Vince] would probably appreciate that as well.

Filed under: hardware, wireless hacks

We all know Siri as the lovable (?) Iphone assistant you can talk to if you need mundane info like the nearest Mexican restaurant or the tallest actor to ever appear in movies. But now, Raspberry Pi Forum user DarkTherapy has figured out how to order Siri to open his garage door.

Read the full article on MAKE

If you have a Stellaris Launchpad sitting around, have a go at using it as a logic analyzer

The Stellaris logic analyzer is based upon this earlier build that took code from a SUMP comparable Arduino logic analyzer and ported it to the much faster and more capable Stellaris Launchpad with an ARM Cortex 4F processor.

This build turns the Launchpad into a 10 MHz, 8-channel logic analyzer with a 16 kB  buffer comparable with just about every piece of software thanks to the SUMP protocol. Even though the ARM chip in the Launchpad isn’t 5 Volt tolerant, only pins 0 and 1 on Port B are limited to 3.6 Volts. All the other pins on Port B are 5 Volt tolerant.

Not a bad piece of work to turn a Launchpad that has been sitting on your workbench into a useful tool.

Filed under: tool hacks