A piano is pictured with two hands playing different notes, G outlined in orange and C outlined in blue.

AI Piano Teacher To Criticize Your Every Move

June 22, 2025 by 1 Comment

Learning new instruments is never a simple task on your own; nothing can beat the instant feedback of a teacher. In our new age of AI, why not have an AI companion complain when you’re off note? This is exactly what [Ada López] put together with their AI-Powered Piano Trainer.

The basics of the piano rely on rather simple boolean actions, either you press a key or not. Obviously, this sets up the piano for many fun projects, such as creative doorbells or helpful AI models. [Ada López] started their AI model with a custom dataset with images of playing specific notes on the piano. These images then get fed into Roboflow and trained using the YOLOv8 model.

Using the piano training has the model run on a laptop and only has a Raspberry Pi for video, and gives instant feedback to the pianist due to the demands of the model. Placing the Pi and an LCD screen for feedback into a simple enclosure allows the easy viewing of how good an AI model thinks you play piano. [Ada López] demos their device by playing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star but there is no reason why other songs couldn’t be added!

While there are simpler piano trainers out there relying on audio cues, this project presents a great opportunity for a fun project for anyone else wanting to take up the baton. If you want to get a little more from having to do less in the physical space, then this invisible piano is perfect for you!

3D Print Glass, Using Accessible Techniques

June 22, 2025 by 4 Comments

When seeing a story from MIT’s Lincoln Labs that promises 3D printing glass, our first reaction was that it might use some rare or novel chemicals, and certainly a super-high-tech printer. Perhaps it was some form of high-temperature laser sintering, unlikely to be within the reach of mere mortals. How wrong we were, because these boffins have developed a way to 3D print a glass-like material using easy-to-source materials and commonly available equipment.

The print medium is sodium silicate solution, commonly known as waterglass, mixed with silica and other inorganic nanoparticles. It’s referred to as an ink, and it appears to be printed using a technique very similar to the FDM printers we all know. The real magic comes in the curing process, though, because instead of being fired in a special furnace, these models are heated to 200 Celsius in an oil bath. They can then be solvent cleaned and are ready for use. The result may not be the fine crystal glass you may be expecting, but we can certainly see plenty of uses for it should it be turned into a commercial product. Certainly more convenient than sintering with a laser cutter.

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Hackaday Links: June 22, 2025

June 22, 2025 by 6 Comments

Hold onto your hats, everyone — there’s stunning news afoot. It’s hard to believe, but it looks like over-reliance on chatbots to do your homework can turn your brain into pudding. At least that seems to be the conclusion of a preprint paper out of the MIT Media Lab, which looked at 54 adults between the ages of 18 and 39, who were tasked with writing a series of essays. They divided participants into three groups — one that used ChatGPT to help write the essays, one that was limited to using only Google search, and one that had to do everything the old-fashioned way. They recorded the brain activity of writers using EEG, in order to get an idea of brain engagement with the task. The brain-only group had the greatest engagement, which stayed consistently high throughout the series, while the ChatGPT group had the least. More alarmingly, the engagement for the chatbot group went down even further with each essay written. The ChatGPT group produced essays that were very similar between writers and were judged “soulless” by two English teachers. Go figure.

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A green box with the answer to if a nuke has gone off with red neon lights

Has A Nuke Gone Off? Indicator

June 22, 2025 by 16 Comments

Look out of a window, ask yourself the question, “Has a nuke gone off?”. Maybe, maybe not, and all of us here at Hackaday need to know the answer to these important questions! Introducing the hasanukegoneoff.com Indicator from [bigcrimping] to answer our cries.

An ESP32 running a MicroPython script handles the critical checks from hasanukegoneoff.com for any notification of nuclear mayhem. This will either power the INS-1 neon bulb, indicating “no” or “yes” in the unfortunate case of a blast. Of course, there is also the button required for testing the notification lights; no chance of failure can be left. All of this is fitted onto a custom dual-sided PCB and placed inside a custom 3D-printed enclosure.

Hasanukegoneoff.com’s detection system, covered before here, relies on an HSN-1000L Nuclear Event Detector to check for neutrons coming from the blast zone. [bigcrimping] also provides the project plans for your own blast detector to answer the critical question of “has a nuke gone off” from anywhere other than the website’s Chippenham, England location.

This entire project is open sourced, so keep sure to check out [bigcrimping]’s GitHub for both portions of this project on the detector and receiver. While this project provides some needed dark humor, nukes are still scary and especially so when disarming them with nothing but a hacksaw and testing equipment.

Thanks to [Daniel Gooch] for the tip.

Drone Photogrammetry

Photogrammetry Takes To The Skies

June 22, 2025 by 8 Comments

Maybe your goal is to preserve the heyday of rail travel with a precise scale replica of a particular railroad station. Maybe you’re making a hyper-local edition of Monopoly in which the houses and hotels are the actual houses and hotels in your hometown.

Whatever the reason, if you have need for shrinkifying a building or other reasonably large object, there is (at least) one sure-fire way to do it, and [ nastideplasy ] is your guide with this tutorial on drone photogrammetry.

The process is essentially the same as any other photogrammetry you may have seen before—take lots of overlapping photos of an object from many different angles around it, stitch those photos together, make a 3D mesh by triangulating corresponding points from multiple photos—but this time the photos are captured by drone, allowing for much larger subjects, so long as you can safely and legally fly a drone around it.

The challenge, of course, is capturing a sufficient number of overlapping photos such that your reconstruction software can process them into a clean 3D mesh. Where purpose-built 3D scanners, automatic turntables, or a steady hand and lots of patience worked well at a smaller scale, skill with a pair of control sticks is the key to getting a good scan of a house.

[ nastideplasy ] also points out the importance of lighting. Direct sunlight and deep shadows can cause issues when processing the images, and doing this at night is almost certainly out of the question. Overcast days are your best bet for a clean scan.

The tutorial calls for software from Autodesk to stitch photos and clean up 3D meshes. We’ve also seen some excellent results with open source options like Meshroom as well.

A C-shaped wooden frame is shown surrounding a circular tongue drum. The wooden frame holds eight black adjustable arms, at the ends of which are mounted solenoids, positioned just above the surface of the drum.

Giving A Drum MIDI Input With Lots Of Solenoids

June 22, 2025 by 5 Comments

As far as giving mechanical instruments electronic control goes, drums are probably the best candidate for conversion; learning to play them is challenging and loud for a human, but they’re a straightforward matter for a microcontroller. [Jeremy Cook]’s latest project takes this approach by using an Arduino Opta to play a tongue drum.

[Jeremy]’s design far the drum controller was inspired by the ring-shaped arrangement of the Cray 2 supercomputer. A laser-cut MDF frame forms a C-shape around the tongue drum, and holds eight camera mount friction arms. Each friction arm holds a solenoid above a different point on the drum head, making it easy to position them. A few supports were 3D-printed, and some sections of PVC tubing form pivots to close the ring frame. [Jeremy] found that the the bare metal tips of the solenoids made a harsh sound against the drum, so he covered the tips of six solenoids with plastic caps, while the other two uncoated tips provide an auditory contrast.

The Arduino Opta is an open-source programmable logic controller normally intended for industrial automation. Here, its silent solid-state relays drive the solenoids, as [Jeremy]’s done before in an earlier experiment. The Opta is programmed to accept MIDI input, which [Jeremy] provided from two of the MIDI controllers which we’ve seen him build previously. He was able to get it working in time for the 2024 Orlando Maker Faire, which was the major time constraint.

Of course, for a project like this you need a MIDI controller, and we’ve previously seen [Jeremy] convert a kalimba into such a controller. We’ve seen this kind of drum machine at least once before, but it’s more common to see a purely electronic implementation.

Tektronix TDS8000 banner

Repairing An Old Tektronix TDS8000 Scope

June 22, 2025 by No comments

Over on his YouTube channel our hacker [CircuitValley] repairs an old TDS8000 scope.

The TDS8000 was manufactured by Tektronix circa 2001 and was also marketed as the CSA8000 Communications Signal Analyzer as well as the TDS8000 Digital Sampling Oscilloscope. Tektronix is no longer manufacturing and selling these scopes but the documentation is still available from their website, including the User Manual (268 page PDF), the Service Manual (198 page PDF), and some basic specs (in HTML).

You can do a lot of things with a TDS8000 scope but particularly its use case was Time-Domain Reflectometry (TDR). A TDR scope is the time-domain equivalent of a Vector Network Analyzer (VNA) which operates in the frequency-domain.

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