For a while now, I’ve been wanting a pair of headphones that automatically pause your music when you remove them. I’d been dreaming up complicated ways to do this, but my friend Kyle reminded me that it is easy and I should just do it. So, I put together a quickie project to do just so! It’s based on an OPTEK OPB606A distance sensor that I got from Jameco, which puts out a low voltage when an object is near it, and a high voltage when all is clear. I whipped together a really sketchy arduino+processing script to allow the sensor to turn the music on and off, and voilà, it’s done!
Well, almost. I left my headphones at work, so it will be more done tomorrow evening after I affix the sensor to them. But for now, you can whet your appetite on the circuit diagram aforementioned sketchy code, which are available after the break. Continue reading →
My friend and I made this Robot Plant for a build series I’ve been running over at Make. Instructions, etc can be found there! There is also a contest with some pretty fabulous prizes that you can win if you build some sort of plant yourself (and you should!).
Dayne Barton of Tokyo Tek put together this great summary video of Make: Tokyo Meeting 06, where he asks both Mitch Altman and myself about our favorite projects.
Spoon Organ is an instrument that I created to show at the Make Tokyo Meeting 06 this past weekend. The user can play musical tunes simply by touching a row of spoons sitting on a table, with a fork added in for good measure. A microcontroller is used to detect changes in capacitance caused by a finger pressing against the metal, which are then sent to a computer using the MIDI protocol.
