There are many ways to take an electrical audio signal and turn it into something you can hear. Moving coil speakers, plasma domes, electrostatic speakers, piezo horns, the list goes on. Last week at the Electromagnetic Field festival in the UK, we encountered another we hadn’t experienced directly before. Bite on a brass rod (sheathed in a drinking straw for hygiene), hear music.
The TOG Skull Radio demo box
This was Skull Radio, a bone conduction speaker courtesy of [Tdr], one of our friends fromTOG hackerspace in Dublin, and its simplicity hid a rather surprising performance. A small DC motor has its shaft connected to a piece of rod, and a small audio power amplifier drives the motor. Nothing is audible until you bite on the rod, and then you can hear the music. The bones of your skull are conducting it directly to your inner ear, without an airborne sound wave in sight.
Read the full story over on their website. https://hackaday.com/2016/08/17/bone-conduction-skull-radio/#comment-3139160
Our August Open Social takes place on Saturday 20th August at 7pm. If you fancy doing something different on a Saturday evening, why not drop in and see us.
If you’ve never been in before, we’ll give you the grand tour. You can chat to members and fellow visitors, and see whats going on.
The space stays open until the last member is left……usually the small hours of Sunday morning. The evening is free to attend for members and visitors alike. Our doors will be open from 7pm. No booking is required…. just turn up. You can drop in for 10 minutes, or stay the whole night. We have parking available. Bring beer, food, gadgets! Hope to see you there.
A bunch of us headed to an event last weekend called Electromagnetic Field in the UK. EMF is a 3 day camping festival held every two years with over a thousand people attending. The weekend is filled with talks, workshops and lots of crazy art installations. We teamed up with other hackers from Ireland to form our own little village to have a place to call home for the weekend. Our members kept themselves busy over the weekend by adding to the lineup with their own talks and workshops check out below.
Receiving live video from the Space station – Daniel Cussen
EMF had a full program of events to keep all the kids entertained. We ran our bridge building competition with the young hackers of EMF. Congratulations to the hope bridge on their win.
Nothing much to see here! A quick weekend afternoon hack. The ebike power supply died, so time to knock up a cable to charge the battery from a variable power supply.
A 3-pin XLR socket, a fuse holder with a 5A fuse and a diode for reverse current protection. A bit of soldering and heatshrink and we’re up and running. Checked it out. Set the power supply to 60v (same as the old charger) with 3A current limit, and we’re charging ok.
After receiving badge we had to share the Duck love, just waiting for it to be added to badge market but giving you a quick preview. Keep an eye out for it.
First of all great to have community like Lasersaur after lots of cutting over last 3 weeks we started to have some issues with our Lasersaur we thought we had broken the focus lense however it just needed a good clean.
Even after this we where still not getting very far after suggestions from Fab Lab Limerick to make following extra long laser head and put cardboard at the end to focus.
