Have you ever thought that is it possible to direct musical performance by only moving your hands in the air without even get in touch with the musical instrument? Well, it might be sounded crazy, but believe it or not, you can really do it with Der Kapellmeister!

For your information, the project is implemented with a glove. Then, it resembles with a conducting baton that has the ability to analyze visible gestures and interprets them into musical elements.

Der Kapellmeister is a very simple device that can be used to test a user’s ability in basic conducting, by using a real conducting baton. Let’s take an example. When a user performs a gesture, the device is automatically display the tempo, time signature and beat number on the LCD screen. It will then output a tick sound through the speaker.

The system can analyze up to four different time signatures at one time! Honestly, Der Kapellmeister is a very suitable device, especially for the beginners of conducting.

Der Kapellmeister is a compact mobile set that consist of a baton and a glove. Furthermore, an accelerometer is attached to the user’s middle finger, while the microcontroller, LCD and speaker are stitched to the wrist area of the glove.

There are many electronic projects have been built based on the Arduino. You might have seen the Arduino Control Panel for Racecars or SUV, but have you ever heard about an Arduino Control Panel for Motorcycles? Yeah, it sounds like pretty amazing, isn’t it?

Well, today’s your lucky day, where we’re going to build an Arduino Control Panel for motorcycles. Before that, you should know that the main purpose of developing this arduino control panel is to measure various locomotion parameters, such as the speedometer, tachometer and gear indicator.

Although it’s still in the prototype stage, but it works perfectly without any hassle.

For this project, you have to prepare these following components:

1. A standard Arduino,

2. A small LCD, and

3. Bluetooth .

Basically, the device is connected to the electrical system of the motorcycle to receive pulses from the tachometer and using a reed switch for wheel rotation. It starts to calculate the wheel speed in Revolutions per minute (RPM), divides it into most recent engine RPM and obtains a unique ratio for each gear!

It’s very a fun and interesting project, especially for all the motorcyclists out there! Build one, stick it on your motorcycle, and do the experiment by yourself.

Have a bunch of old unused hard drives and you don’t know what to do about it? Instead of throwing it into the trash bin, you can simply modify it into a cool hard drive clock!

Technically, it won’t cost you a dime to do the modification, as you’re going to use the recycled items to build this hard drive clock. By the way, those essential components that you’re needed are:

• Solid metal case,
• LED at front panel,
• Power connector and switch at the back,
• Power supply +5V and +12V, and
• A 12V fan.

Well, this project is based on PIC18F2320, which is running at 40MHz. The microcontroller can be used to read current time and date from RTC. It will automatically refresh data every hour.

Two timers of microcontroller synchronize work of whole device. There are two different timers, which as Timer0 and Timer1. Timer0 is responsible to measure time of full disk revolution and calculate moment for LEDs to turn On/Off. Timer1 is configured as real time clock and is used to scan keyboard, and refresh LCD.

By the way, the keyboard contains two illuminated buttons, where is used to set correct time/data or select clock mode!

In the past, our ancestors mostly putted their photos in the old-fashioned photo frames, where it is not only huge but lack of any other useful functions as well!

Time has passing by and the technology keeps changing. Beside of the ordinary photo frame, you’re now have another option to choose from: Digital photo frame.

The digital photo frame is not only can display your photos in JPEG format, but it can also display the photos as a slideshow.

Some other useful features of digital photo frames are:

• They come with adjustable time interval;
• The user can send photos to the printer;
• Some additional multimedia functions, such as movie clips recorded in a digital camera’s movie mode, MPEG video files or MP3 audio;
• Loading pictures over the internet from RSS feeds (Photo sharing through Flickr or Picasa!);
• Some of them can even display txt files!

So, if you’re interested to DIY your very own digital photo frame, then you must understand the basic concept first.

If you refer to the above figure, it shows that the SD card, PIC and LCD are the three main components that needed for this project. Since this digital photo frame is a small frame, thus you can bring it and display photos anytime, anywhere you want!

Do you have deep interest on how to launch the rocket or even to control the firework? If you do have this kind of thought, then you must be interested on this Microcontroller Rocket/Firework Launcher!

Basically, this project is fully based on the Arduino Microcontroller. For your information, it’s also a fine combination of wireless fireworks controller and microcontroller rocket launcher.

An Atmega32 microcontroller is the “main brain” for this project because of its quantity of digital I/O lines. Well, if you want to keep things simple but still allowing a workable user interface, then you might consider only using four buttons and two switches, which as:

• The two switches: Power switch and key switch
• The four buttons: Left/Right Launch Buttons and Up/Down buttons

One thing that you should consider for this project is the different power source. Instead of the ordinary battery, the rechargeable alarm battery would be easy to integrate and would allow recharging. Furthermore, even different up/down buttons next to the LCD would be better improving the whole launcher system and it can make it looking more professional as well!