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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!"
Now we just need a printer than can play Fur Elise.
Indeed, the project is the "robot that can play a xylophone" part, not the xylophone itself. The same goes for the solenoids.
Anyone care to test their demo to tell them how much each note is untuned?
New songs can be programmed in with C macros
I think this tells you everything you need to know about the people involved.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
doesn't make patrick moore redundant.
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.
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.
Yeah! They could have bought all the other parts too! In fact, they could have not bought or built anything and just fucking googled jingle bells on youtube, stupid fuckers!
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?"
True geeks would have used a much less suited and much more obscure language.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
Python?
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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).
MIDI? Oh, right. A geek/nerd wouldn't use a standard that has existed for 20+ years just to play jingle bells.
My thought was "I want to combine this with a MIDI interface now".
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
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.
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/
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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Mod up. I saw this on Metheny's website when I went there looking to see if I could stream or download samples of his newer music. I could do the former BTW.
Long-time Pat Metheny fan.
There was also a project in Australia to play a clarinet robotically. Much harder, if you ask me, than playing a percussion instrument robotically.
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAIeTm4lO5Q
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
New songs can be programmed in with C macros
I guess a C# joke would have fallen flat here.