I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time. The Basement Scientist, a fine DIYer and hardware hacker, has finally received his MIDI shield boards from Batch PCB. What does this mean? It means that soon, he’ll do a run of MIDI shield PCBs that will be available for purchase. In turn, that means you can easily run MIDI through your Arduino, making it fun and easy to create your own instruments.

I received my two MIDI Shield circuit boards from Batch PCB over the weekend. I’m happy to report that they came out 100% error free. However, I think I’m going to make one or two minor tweaks before getting a bunch produced.

MIDI requires the use of the Arduino serial port pins, which are also used by the on-board USB programmer. With my current design the MIDI Shield has to be unplugged before the Arduino can be programmed, which is a pain in the ass. Instead, I’m going to add a jumper to the MIDI Shield. Remove the jumper, program the Arduino, then put the jumper back on. Much better than pulling the whole shield off every time you need to upload code.

I’m incredibly excited to get my hands on one of these shields. I was contemplating on building my own but TMS has done a fine job and I wholeheartedly support it.

Link

If a gadget can make Totino’s Pizza Rolls and attach LEDs to a board, it’s good in my book. Such is the case with this amazing hack from Cornell students Ko Ihara and Kashif Javed. These guys turned a basic toaster oven into a soldering iron. The LED display even outputs temperature thanks to an ATmega32 microcontroller.

If you want to build your own, the instructions are up on the student’s site. Take warning though, as it’s a dangerous mod for doing somewhat-dangerous work. If I had a dollar for every time I burned myself on a toaster or soldering iron, I’d buy Gearfuse.com and turn it into a porn site.

Link (via)

Not exactly a true ‘midi’ pedal in the full sense of the word. The PCB used for the sound system is actually the old innards of a keyboard, connected through Radio Shack foot pedals that Myspacer, Tvkid, had to travel on a 60 mile marathon run, to find enough for his creation.

Running the pedal system through a laptop through a USB midi interface and replacing the PCB keyboard with a drum machine were the finishing touches on this home grown midi simulator. Here’s how Tvkid explains it on his project post:

Just to recap, here’s the process of how it works:

1. Press foot pedal.
2. Foot pedal, connected to PCB, acts like a key on a PC keyboard.
3. The “keyboard” PCB chip sends a standard PS/2 signal to laptop.
4. Virtual keyboard program on laptop gets keyboard command and converts it to MIDI.
5. MIDI is sent to synth unit.
6. Synth unit generates sound and spits it out of my amp, making our music sound even cheesier than before!

Surely one of the coolest blog posts ever posted to MySpace. — Andrew Dobrow

[MySpace Blog via Hack A Day]