Eventually all music will be made this way: a 24-volt power supply, an Arduino board, and three stepper motors. In fact Akon is actually a simple stepper motor attached to a Vocoder and Pro Tools. Look it up! It’s true!

One more video after the jump.
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Make, as usual, has an excellent round-up of open source hardware kits based our own favorite, the Arduino. The list includes all the add-ons, like the Ethernet and Motor shields, and devices like the Seeduino, a more powerful Arduino clone.

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These little Arduino boards are a real boon to amateur electronics tinkerers: cheap, versatile, and very small. This guy had the idea to make a high-speed photography setup using one, instead of the more direct circuits usually involved. His reasoning was that the Arduino allows for a lot of easy customization, like for instance hooking up a sound sensor as well as a laser sensor. It allows for failsafes, better timing, and involvement of mixed hardware and software which may in turn control the object drop, speed of projectile, and so on.

I’d definitely be rocking one of these if I had the time to throw down on some sweet high-speed shooting. His gallery is here, but there are more photos over at Hack n Mod.

This haxor installed an Arduino Mini into a Game Boy case and then used a MIDI keyboard to play through the internal speaker. It basically turns the Game Boy into a synthesizer. The code is open so you can mod it all yourself. The Arduino is an open hardware platform that we’ve covered here quite a bit.

This odd fellow is an Arduino-based system for reading - and reacting to - incoming Twitter messages. While his eyes look like they’re made of CORN it’s nice to see someone as sad as me about getting incoming Tweets.

via Giz

Anita Lillie at the MIT Media Lab created an Arduino-based sleep tracker to process where she keeps her arms while thrashing in the great deep sea of sleep.

The best part is that she created a graphing system that shows her movements and positions while she slept.

My main problem with waking up in the morning is that feeling of grogginess along with an intense desire to sleep more. However, I’ve noticed that sleeping without an alarm clock, and just waking up whenever I wake up, helps. And I’ve also noticed that sometimes when I wake up I am dramatically more refreshed than usual. Reading about sleep on the web led me to learn more about sleep cycles. One interesting page (”The power of the Sleep Cycle”) claimed that it wasn’t the amount of sleep one gets, but the part of the sleep cycle we wake up in. The author suggested that, because we sleep in cycles about 90 minutes long, we should aim to wake up in the transition between sleep cycles, since the brain is more alert and refreshed at that time.

A noble goal and a great way to look like a cyborg while you sleep.

via Make

Arduino boards are very cool little system boards that let you do all sorts of cool electronics tricks by adding a few sensors and writing some code on your PC or Mac. Now theere is the Adruino Nano, a board that packs in the power of the Arduino Diecimila into something the size of a stick of gum.

The board is based on the ATmega168 and has 16 I/O pits, 6 analog inputs, a USB jack, and most of that means nothing to me since I stopped building my on electronics when I realized resistors came in multiple colors. My buddy Paul is really great at this stuff so maybe I’ll have him make me a tele-dildonics kit.

Arduino is little open source circuit board that lets you create some fairly compelling projects with a few lines of code and some circuit boards. The latest addition to the project is LiquidWare’s TouchShield, an sensitive OLED that sits on top of the main board. Here it interacts with its human subject.

(via Make)