Cardboard is a surprisingly durable material, especially in its corrugated form. It’s extremely lightweight for its strength, is easy to work, can be folded and formed into almost any shape, is incredibly inexpensive, and when it has done its duty it can be recycled back into more paper. For these reasons, it’s often used in packaging material but it can be used to build all kinds of things outside of ensuring that products arrive at their locations safely. This working cardboard record player is one example.

While the turntable doesn’t have working records in the sense that the music is etched into them like vinyl, each has its own RFID chip embedded that allows the ESP32 in the turntable’s body to identify them. Each record corresponds to a song stored on an SD card that instructs the ESP32 to play the appropriate song. It also takes care of spinning the record itself with a small stepper motor. There are a few other details on this build that tie it together too, including a movable needle arm held on with a magnet and a volume slider.

As far as a building material goes, cardboard is fairly underrated in our opinion. Besides small projects like this turntable, we’ve also seen it work as the foundation for a computer, and it even has the strength and durability to be built into a wall or even used as shelving material. And, of course, it’s a great material to use when prototyping new designs.

RoEx Automix lets you mix and master your audio tracks using AI. Users can use Automix for free but the tool runs on a credit system, and you only get 1 credit per month as a free user. In my opinion the pricing is a little expensive for what they offer, however you can always […]

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Melobytes is a suite of AI tools for generating music and sound. There are a ton of different features which can help musicians gain inspiration, and even without prior music experience you’ll be able to generate music tracks from text or other prompts. One of the coolest tools on there is the ability to generate […]

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Tiny Tapout is an interesting project, leveraging the power of cloud computing and collaborative purchasing to make the mysterious art of IC design more accessible for hardware hackers. [Yeo Kheng Meng] is one such hacker, and they have produced their very first custom IC for use with their retrocomputing efforts. As they lament, they left it a little late for the shuttle run submission deadline, so they came up with a very simple project with the equivalent behaviour of the Covox Speech Thing, which is just a basic R-2R ladder DAC hanging from a PC parallel port.

The plan was to capture an 8-bit input bus and compare it against a free-running counter. If the input value is larger than the counter, the output goes high; otherwise, it goes low. This produces a PWM waveform representing the input value. Following the digital output with an RC low-pass filter will generate an analogue representation. It’s all very simple stuff. A few details to contend with are specific to Tiny Tapout, such as taking note of the enable and global resets. These are passed down from the chip-level wrapper to indicate when your design has control of the physical IOs and is selected for operation. [Yeo] noticed that the GitHub post-synthesis simulation failed due to not taking note of the reset condition and initialising those pesky flip-flops.

After throwing the design down onto a Mimas A7 Artix 7 FPGA board for a quick test, data sent from a parallel port-connected PC popped out as a PWM waveform as expected, and some test audio could be played. Whilst it may be true that you don’t have to prototype on an FPGA, and some would argue that it’s a lot of extra effort for many cases, without a good quality graphical simulation and robust testbench, you’re practically working blind. And that’s not how working chips get made.

If you want to read into Tiny Tapeout some more, then we’ve a quick guide for that. Or, perhaps hear it direct from the team instead?

Bark is an open-source text-to-audio generator that can create realistic sounding speech, music, and sound effects from text prompts. It supports multiple languages and can match different voices and accents. Bark is built using transformer models and generates audio directly from text, it can even generate different pronunciations and accents. There is also a Hugging […]

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[Simon B] enters our 2024 Business Card Challenge with BAUDI/O, a genuinely useful audio output device. The device is based around the PCM2706 DAC, which handles all the USB interfacing and audio stack for you, needing only a reference crystal and the usual sprinkling of passives. This isn’t just a DAC board, though; it’s more of an audio experimentation tool with two microcontrollers to play with.

The first ATTiny AT1614 is hooked up to a simple LED vu-meter, and the second is connected to the onboard AD5252 digipot, which together allows one to custom program the response to the digital inputs to suit the user. The power supply is taken from the USB connection. A pair of ganged LM2663 charge-pump inverters allow inversion of the 5V rail to provide the necessary -5 V for the output amplifiers.  This is then fed to the LM4562-based CMoy-type headphone amplifier.  This design has a few extra stages, so with a bit of soldering, you can adjust the output filtering to suit. An LM1117 derives 3.3 V from the USB input to provide another power rail,  mostly for the DAC.

There’s not much more to say other than this is a nice, clean audio design, with everything broken out so you can tinker with it and get exactly the audio experience you want.

Suno AI is an audio generator that was originally known as Bark, and was previously only able to generate speech; it can now be used to create all types of audio, from speech to music to sound effects. Suno AI now uses a new model known as “Chirp” that can create realistic music and vocals. […]

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Sometimes, startups fail due to technical problems or a lack of interest from potential investors and fail to gain development traction. This latter case appears to be the issue befalling A³ Audio. So, the developers have done the next best thing, made the project open source, and are actively looking for more people to pitch in. So what is it? The project is centered around the idea of spatial audio or 3D audio. The system allows ‘audio motion’ to be captured, mixed and replayed, all the while synchronized to the music. At least that’s as much as we can figure out from the documentation!

The system is made up of three main pieces of hardware. The first part is the core (or server), which is essentially a Linux PC running an OSC (Open Sound Control) server. The second part is a ‘motion sampler’, which inputs motion into the server. Lastly, there is a Mixer, which communicates using the OSC protocol (over Ethernet) to allow pre-mixing of spatial samples and deployment of samples onto the audio outputs. In addition to its core duties, the ‘core’ also manages effects and speaker handling.

The motion module is based around a Raspberry Pi 4 and a Teensy microcontroller, with a 7-inch touchscreen display for user input and oodles of NeoPixels for blinky feedback on the button matrix. The mixer module seems simpler, using just a Teensy for interfacing the UI components.

We don’t see many 3D audio projects, but this neat implementation of a beam-forming microphone phased array sure looks interesting.

Some people trick out their cars. Some, their computers. There are even people who max out their audio systems, although back in 1979, there was more of that going on, probably, than today where you discresionary income is split so many ways. Case in point: [Alan Cross] remembers how excited he was to get the Radio Shack catalog that year. He was working at a grocery store, saved his money, and — over time — picked up a haul ranging from an equalizer to a strobe light.

Who didn’t need a power meter or a “light organ?” These gadgets seem cheap until you realize it was 1979 and [Alan] was a student working at a grocery store. He points out that the $20 power meter is about the same as $80 today.

Not that he got everything he wanted back then, either. He also wanted an Atari light synthesizer known as the C240. This oddball device converted sound from your stereo into video patterns on your TV. What did that look like? An old video from [World One Video] shows it off:

If you could find one in 1977, the $170 price tag might have put you off.

There are other gadgets to explore. A tiny TV/oscilloscope, an audio expander, and quite a few other period gizmos.

We are suckers for old tech around here, although usually towards electronic hobby gadgets. Not that we didn’t take an interest in mobile record players or 8-track scanners.

Powered by artificial intelligence, Boomy’s music generator creates fully-produced songs at your direction, and even lets you monetize them! You don’t need to know anything about creating music to get started. Submit a release and Boomy will distribute your songs to all major streaming services and stores worldwide – including Spotify, YouTube, TikTok, Apple Music, […]

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It never fails. Lay down some kind of superlative — fastest, cheapest, smallest — around this place and someone out there says, “Hold my beer” and gets to work. In this case, it’s another, even simpler audio oscillator, this time with just a loudspeaker and a battery.

Attentive readers will recall the previous title holder was indeed pretty simple, consisting only of the mic and speaker from an old landline telephone handset wired in series with a battery. Seeing this reminded [Hydrogen Time] of a lucky childhood accident while experimenting with a loudspeaker, which he recreates in the video below. The BOM for this one is even smaller than the previous one — just a small speaker and a battery, plus a small scrap of solid hookup wire. The wire is the key; rather than connecting directly to the speaker terminal, it connects to the speaker frame on one end while the other is carefully adjusted to just barely touch the flexible wire penetrating the speaker cone on its way to the voice coil.

When power is applied with the correct polarity, current flows through the wire into the voice coil, which moves the cone and breaks the circuit. The speaker’s diaphragm resets the cone, completing the circuit and repeating the whole process. The loudspeaker makes a little click with each cycle, leading to a very rough-sounding oscillator. [Hydrogen Time] doesn’t put a scope on it, but we suspect the waveform would be a ragged square wave whose frequency depends on the voltage, the spring constant of the diaphragm, and the spacing between the fixed wire and the voice coil lead.

Yes, we realize this is stretching the definition of an audio oscillator somewhat, but you’ve got to admit it’s simple. Can you get it even simpler?

NASA astronaut [Don Pettit] shared a short video from an experiment he performed on the ISS back in 2012, demonstrating the effects of sound waves on water in space. Specifically, seeing what happens when a sphere of water surrounding an air bubble perched on a speaker cone is subjected to a variety of acoustic waves.

The result is visually striking patterns across different parts of the globe depending on what kind of sound waves were created. It’s a neat visual effect, and there’s more where that came from.

[Don] experimented with music as well as plain tones, and found that cello music had a particularly interesting effect on the setup. Little drops of water would break off from inside the sphere and start moving around the inside of the air bubble when cello music was played. You can see this in action as part of episode 160 from SmarterEveryDay (cued up to 7:51) which itself is about exploring the phenomenon of how water droplets can appear to act in an almost hydrophobic way.

This isn’t the first time water and sound collide in visually surprising ways. For example, check out the borderline optical illusion that comes from pouring water past a subwoofer emitting 24 Hz while the camera captures video at 24 frames per second.