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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!"
Wasn't this on /. a few years ago?
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
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!
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.
New songs can be programmed in with C macros
I guess a C# joke would have fallen flat here.