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Homemade Robotic Xylophone Plays Holiday Melodies
compumike writes "Just in time to add a bit of geeky holiday cheer to your office, this video demonstrates how to build a robotic xylophone featuring handmade solenoids and aluminum bars, and shows it playing several classic holiday tunes. New songs can be programmed in with C macros, and this project could even be extended to perhaps play a melody when a new e-mail arrived or a software build has finished compiling!"
I can't believe the actually designed their own xylophone. They could have just bought one.
Now we just need a printer than can play Fur Elise.
doesn't make patrick moore redundant.
Does not compute!
*ASPLODE*
The meat of exercise could have been summarised in about 3 sentences; I did not need to watch 13 minutes of video. Congrats, you have a GCSE / high school knowledge of electronics.
ReMi Fa DoDo.
That's a glockenspiel. A Xylophone has wooden bars. I know because as a kid I assumed it would be the other way round.
A xylophone has wooden bars. This would more correctly be called a metallophone.
With that important piece of information pointed out, you can all carry on now.
During the time I worked on electronic HID ballasts, I wrote some python code allowing a string with notes to be played on the transformers of the ballast, by changing the lamp current commutation frequency accordingly through the serial debug interface of the ballast's microcontroller. This reminded me and it was really fun, and didn't cost my boss much time either.
"Their damn toys playing Christmas music all year round just drove us all crazy!"
You're making jokes, but certain printers used to do EXACTLY THAT as part of their diagnostics. I believe it was certain IBM inkjet printers, though it's been so long I don't really recall. I do know we used to get calls from baffled users saying "you're not gonna believe this" at which point we'd ask "is your printer playing fur elise?"
Pat Metheny's Orchestrion takes this to a much higher sphere: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VymAn8QJNQ
They should write a few more tunes... it would easily supplant this project in geekiness.
They have until February to design the robotic slide guitar and robotic congos. Cocktails not included...
Distributed Denial of APK: It takes 15 seconds to reply to him anonymously, but wastes tons of his time if we all do it.
Nice handmade bar! I'll have two shots of transparent aluminum.
I hate when nerds don't know their stuff. Xylophones and Marimbas are made from wood. Orchestra Bells and Glockenspiels are metal. Also, striking the bar directly in the middle is what makes them sound so bad. The 'mallet' should be off center for the same reason the suspension bars are. Putting the hammers on the ends of the bars would improve the sound dramatically (theoretically).
I *loved* this project, even if it isn't brand-spanking new, and even if they got the xylo- / metallo- / whatever terminology not quite right. They got the physics right, even going back to original reports. Moreover, they didn't intone "4th degree differential equations" all-wide-eyed, but, instead with confidence that it's knowable and understandable. They not only machined their own bars, but wound their own solenoids on custom-machined forms! Holy western union, Batman! That's beyond nerdy: That's Thomas Edison / Alexander Graham Bell levels of intensity. Reminds me of MIT undergrads.
And, beyond all that nerdfest of wonderfulness, they managed to make a very watchable and instructive video. To all of you who are bashing this impressive effort, I say: go do better, and then come back and sling your darts and arrows.
They wound their own solenoids by hand! I can't get over that. My father, when he was working as an engineer, built a machine to wind coils because doing them by hand was so onerous. Doing it by hand, and showing how on a video, that's beyond showing off, that's showing *how*.
My hat is off to these folks: well done!
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
The next step would be to add a simple MIDI interface - an optocoupler and a UART that runs 31,250 baud would work, IIRC. I build one in college (back in the early 80's). That baud rate is 1/64th of 2MHz, which was prescaled down by the Z-80 DART chip I used.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
back in the day we just wrote the code to cause the correct radio interference pattern for each note so you didn't have to build a xylophone or solenoids or anything. Just put a simple little AM radio on top of the computer and, voila, music.
These guys have invented the electric pianola. Brilliant! But wait, this one is robotic!
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Just one instrument? "J-Bot" has and entire band with horns, guitars, and drums all controlled by robots. http://www.capturedbyrobots.com/
Pat Metheny Orchestration Project. Been there and he owns the tee-shirt.
While I am a hobbyist in my own right, the tool set sophistication of this project is a bit high. Home cut and tuned aluminum bars? Give me a break, it would be less time consuming, easier and cheaper to run to "toys are us" and BUY a cheap xylophone. Seriously, lathe cut solenoid cases? OMG, who has a lathe? I would have gone to a hardware store, or sowing store to buy some plastic spools. Again, cheaper, easier, and less time consuming. MOSFETs are cool, but for the current and time constrains, a simple 2n2222 would work fine. Lastly LED's as a clamp diode? OMG! LEDs are slow, you'll eventually cook the mosfet regardless.
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Pat Metheny is touring now with a "robot band" on his Orchestrion tour. There are a couple videos on the web and a fairly good writeup on Wired: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-02/01/robot-band-backs-pat-metheny-on-orchestrion-tour
Pat's website has more info about his reasons for this approach: http://www.patmetheny.com/orchestrioninfo/
Not much tech weenie info, but pretty interesting for the musically minded.
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