Brad shares a project from the depths of COVID lockdown: a budget DIY mechanical keyboard. As a student, Brad yearned for a fancy mech, but a lack of funds resulted in a far more impressive route: soldering a Teensy directly to the switches of a completely DIY typing tool.

The soldering alone took about three days, but it lasted for several years, until Brad had the budget for a commercial keeb, and still brings back fond memories. Now working on combat robotics, Brad relishes every opportunity to reuse the knowledge gained from this early project.

The bizarre Suzuki Omnichord looks a bit like a prop from a weird 80s sci-fi show, but is in fact a real instrument, developed to create harp-like arpeggios, and first introduced in 1981, then re-introduced as the OM-108 in 2024.

Those familiar with its odd shape and interface will see immediate echoes in Benjamin Poilve’s open-source minichord synthesizer.

The pocket-sized instrument allows anyone to create pleasant-sounding chord progressions, without requiring extensive knowledge of music theory. Strumming the “harp touch zone” allows any of twelve notes to be triggered and, with continued contact, held. The Teensy 4.0-based instrument can also act as a MIDI device over USB. Having won Seeed’s Co-Create competition, the minichord is now available for purchase. The hardware and firmware to build your own is available on GitHub, and excellent assembly instructions and a user manual can be found on the project’s web site. You can also connect with the project creator on the PJRC forums.

We’ve all dreamed of flight, but Nick Rehm’s dRehmFlight VTOL brings that dream closer for hobbyists and hackers looking to get their weird contraptions airborne.

Based on a Teensy 4.0 plus TDK MPU-6050 six-axis IMU, the project is intended to teach flight control and stabilization concepts, rather than competing with more specific platforms.

Out of the box, dRehmFlight VTOL supports six speed controllers over OneShot125, with a further seven PWMs for servos or traditional ESCs. The code is extensively documented in order to facilitate learning, and a further 72 pages of documentation, as well as extensive YouTube tutorials and examples make getting started as quick and painless as possible.