Blog Posts

James Burton has upgraded the micro controller on his impressive openDog robot with a Teensy 3.6.

James has been building open Dog, an open source robot inspired by the Boston Dynamics dog robots.  He recently upgraded the micro controller to the Teensy 3.6, replacing 3 Arduino MEGAs with it.  The Teensy 3.6 provides 6 serial ports, needed for the motor controllers, and allows the code to run in one place, avoiding multiple serial hops.

He’s published a multi part video series on the building of openDog that is well worth checking out.

The project is fully open source with the code published on GitHub.

Mingjing Huang has developed the LEDoctopus, an expansion board to make developing your LED projects easier.

The LEDoctopus I/O expansion board makes it easy to get started on LED projects – no soldering required.  All you need is to plug in your Teensy, with pins; up to 8 WS281x LED strips using standard terminal blocks; and 5V power using a standard barrel connector.  You can also use USB power through the Teensy. Or if you have a high power application, the board includes a place to add a connector rated up to 45A.  Once you have everything plugged in, you’re ready to start using the OCTOWS2811 library to control your LEDs

This board is available on Tindie.

Clovis Fritzen put together a data logger to collect information from his experiments.

The goal of the project was to design an easy to use data logging device that features both analog and digital readings.  The project started with a basic sketch to ready data from an analog input and store it to an SD card.  Future ideas for the project include adding a small LCD screen and making the logging internal configurable.

Code for the project is available on GitHub.

Loftur Jónasson has updated his Power and SWR Meter with a more powerful processor and better display.

The first revision of the meter used a Teensy ++ and a know to navigate menus on the display.  In this updated version he upgraded to a Teensy 3.2 and increased the sampling from 200 to 1,000 times per second.  The display has also been upgraded to a TFT touch display not only more information being displayed, but for easier navigation as well.

Build details and source code is available on this project page.

Nick Engmann gave his Alexa some personality by adding an ADC-controlled eyeball to it.

Nick picked up some Amazon Echo-Dots to hack during a sale.  He decided whip up a 3D printed enclosure and add some personality with an animated eye using a Teensy 3.2 and a TFT LCD display.  The project was partially inspired by Adafruit’s Uncanny-Eyes tutorial.

Code for the project is published on GitHub.

 

Bertrand Fan got creative and automated part of the gameplay for Zelda: Breath of the Wild on his Nintendo Switch.

After *many* hours of gameplay, Bertrand had yet to defeat all of the Divine Beasts.  Anyone who has played Zelda knows that having advanced weapons and armor are they key to success, and those require rupees (the Zelda game currency).  To acquire rupees you need to either be really good at the game, or figure out how to hack the game.  Bertrand went with the latter.  By using a Teensy ++ to act as a joystick, he was able to automate playing the bowling game in Zelda to quickly acquire the elusive rupees.

There is a great write up of how the automation came about in this blog post.

Instructions on how to build your own as well as the source code are available on GitHub.

 

Hanz Electronics has made a cool MIDI Adapter to work with the Pocket Operator music devices.

Using a Teensy 3.6 and held in a custom 3D printed case this adapter uses pogo pins to make contact with the exposed button pads on the Pocket Operator allowing you to trigger all 23 buttons via MIDI.  It also has an internal digital polyphonic synth loaded with features.

This convenient adapter is available on Tindie and  the source code is available on GitHub.

Jeff Pearson has completed his remake of the Panther XL game controller with the addition of a custom joystick.

The first part of the project was the custom trackball controller.  Jeff continued on with the project and added a joystick to complete the remake of the PantherXL joystick (last produced in 1998).  While the PantherXL was popular, the lack of USB connector meant that it didn’t work with more modern computers of the time.  Jeff really liked the joystick/trackball combo and decided to make his own using a Teensy ++ and the USB Joystick functionality.

Code for the project is available on this Google Drive.