Category Archives: digital audio hacks

Hackaday Prize Entry: SNAP Is Almost Geordi La Forge’s Visor

Posted on September 6, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

Echolocation projects typically rely on inexpensive distance sensors and the human brain to do most of the processing. The team creating SNAP: Augmented Echolocation are using much stronger computational power to translate robotic vision into a 3D soundscape.

The SNAP team starts with an Intel RealSense R200. The first part of the processing happens here because it outputs a depth map which takes the heavy lifting out of robotic vision. From here, an AAEON Up board, packaged with the RealSense, takes the depth map and associates sound with the objects in the field of view.

Binaural sound generation is a …read more

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Posted in AAEON Up, assistive technologies, augmented reality, digital audio hacks, echolocation, Intel RealSense, RealSense R200, wearable hacks | Leave a comment

Turning On Your Amplifier With A Raspberry Pi

Posted on August 28, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

Life is good if you are a couch potato music enthusiast. Bluetooth audio allows the playing of all your music from your smartphone, and apps to control your hi-fi give you complete control over your listening experience.

Not quite so for [Daniel Landau] though. His Cambridge Audio amplifier isn’t quite the latest generation, and he didn’t possess a handy way to turn it on and off without resorting to its infrared remote control. It has a proprietary interface of some kind, but nothing wireless to which he could talk from his mobile device.

His solution is fairly straightforward, which in …read more

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Posted in bluetooth, digital audio hacks, home automation, home hacks, home-assistant, lirc, Raspberry Pi | Leave a comment

We Should Stop Here, It’s Bat Country!

Posted on August 11, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

[Roland Meertens] has a bat detector, or rather, he has a device that can record ultrasound – the type of sound that bats use to echolocate. What he wants is a bat detector. When he discovered bats living behind his house, he set to work creating a program that would use his recorder to detect when bats were around.

[Roland]’s workflow consists of breaking up a recording from his backyard into one second clips, loading them in to a Python program and running some machine learning code to determine whether the clip is a recording of a bat or not …read more

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Posted in bat detector, bats, digital audio hacks, keras, machine learning, python, tensorflow | Leave a comment

Bessel Filter Design

Posted on July 29, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

Once you fall deep enough into the rabbit hole of any project, specific information starts getting harder and harder to find. At some point, trusting experts becomes necessary, even if that information is hard to find, obtuse, or incomplete. [turingbirds] was having this problem with Bessel filters, namely that all of the information about them was scattered around the web and in textbooks. For anyone else who is having trouble with these particular filters, or simply wants to learn more about them, [turingbirds] has put together a guide with all of the information he has about them.

For those who …read more

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Posted in analog, audio, bessel, design, digital audio hacks, filter, guide, how-to | Leave a comment

Designing the Atom Smasher Guitar Pedal

Posted on July 25, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

[Alex Lynham] has been creating digital guitar pedals for a while and after releasing the Atom Smasher, a glitchy lo-fi digital delay pedal, he had people start asking him how he designed digital effects pedals rather than analog effects. In fact, he had enough interest, that he wrote an article on it.

The article starts with some background on [Alex], the pedals he’s built and why he chose not to work on pedals full-time. Eventually, the article gets to the how [Alex] designed the Atom Smasher. He starts by describing the chip he used, the same one that many hobbyists, …read more

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Posted in atom smasher, digital audio hacks, fv-1, guitar pedal, musical hacks | Leave a comment

Robotic Glockenspiel and Hacked HDD’s Make Music

Posted on May 2, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

[bd594] likes to make strange objects. This time it’s a robotic glockenspiel and hacked HDD‘s. [bd594] is no stranger to Hackaday either, as we have featured many of his past projects before including the useless candle or recreating the song Funky town from Old Junk.

His latest project is quite exciting. He has incorporated his robotic glockenspiel with a hacked hard drive rhythm section to play audio controlled via a PIC 16F84A microcontroller. The song choice is Axel-F. If you had a cell phone around the early 2000’s you were almost guaranteed to have used this song as a ringtone …read more

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Posted in digital audio hacks, digital music, hard drive speaker, mechanical music, robot, robot musician, robotic glockspiel, robotics, robots hacks | Leave a comment

Friday Hack Chat: Audio Amplifier Design

Posted on March 29, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

Join [Jørgen Kragh Jakobsen], Analog/digital Design Engineer at Merus-Audio, for this week’s Hack Chat.

Every week, we find a few interesting people making the things that make the things that make all the things, sit them down in front of a computer, and get them to spill the beans on how modern manufacturing and technology actually happens. This is the Hack Chat, and it’s happening this Friday, March 31, at noon PDT (20:00 UTC).

Jørgen’s company has developed a line of multi level Class D amplifiers that focus on power reduction to save battery life in mobile application without losing …read more

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Posted in ASIC, digital audio hacks, Hack Chat, Hackaday Columns, Keysight, manufacturing, Matt Martin, silicon | Leave a comment

The Hard Way of Cassette Tape Auto-Reverse

Posted on March 23, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

The audio cassette is an audio format that presented a variety of engineering challenges during its tenure. One of the biggest at the time was that listeners had to physically remove the cassette and flip it over to listen to the full recording. Over the years, manufacturers developed a variety of “auto-reverse” systems that allowed a cassette deck to play a full tape without user intervention. This video covers how Akai did it – the hard way.

Towards the end of the cassette era, most manufacturers had decided on a relatively simple system of having the head assembly rotate while …read more

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Posted in audio cassette, auto-reverse, autoreverse, cassette, cassette tape, digital audio hacks, teardown | Leave a comment

Neural Network Composes Music; Says “I’ll be Bach”

Posted on March 17, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

[carykh] took a dive into neural networks, training a computer to replicate Baroque music. The results are as interesting as the process he used. Instead of feeding Shakespeare (for example) to a neural network and marveling at how Shakespeare-y the text output looks, the process converts Bach’s music into a text format and feeds that to the neural network. There is one character for each key on the piano, making for an 88 character alphabet used during the training. The neural net then runs wild and the results are turned back to audio to see (or hear as it were) …read more

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Posted in Andrej Karpathy, bach, Baroque, Classical, digital audio hacks, midi, Mozart, musical hacks, neural network, processing, RNN | Leave a comment

Circuit Bent CD Player Is Glitch Heaven

Posted on January 1, 2017 by Fernando Gomes

Circuit bending is the art of creatively short circuiting low voltage hardware to create interesting and unexpected results. It’s generally applied to things like Furbys, old Casio keyboards, or early consoles to create audio and video glitches for artistic effect. It’s often practiced with a random approach, but by bringing in a little knowledge, you can get astounding results. [r20029] decided to apply her knowledge of CD players and RAM to create this glitched out Sony Discman.

Portable CD players face the difficult problem of vibration and shocks causing the laser to skip tracks on the disc, leading to annoying …read more

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Posted in cd player, circuit bend, circuit bending, circuit bent, digital audio hacks, discman, patch, patch bay, patchbay, portable audio hacks, ram, sony | Leave a comment