Legos, the ultimate prototyping material. Many of us have wished we could have music controllers that could be assembled and customized with the ease of Legos; the Lego-like Mawzer modular controller system got our hopes up but still doesn’t seem to have evolved into a product you can actually buy.
Of course, why build something that’s reminiscent of Legos when you could just build it out of real Legos? The stekgreif project has done just that, thanks to a team of three German students (as near as I can figure) named P. Zentis, D. Tzschentke, and G. Homann. (Guys, if you’re out there and want to check in and tell us more, please do!)
stekgreif project page
Flickr stream (currently only one shot in there)
The project looks fascinating. What they’ve done is to take standard sensor components (pots, buttons, a joystick, touchpad, IR beam, and music keyboard), build them into blocks that can connect to a standard Lego board, and provide electrical connections through the board — utterly brilliant, and utterly doable. If you want to recreate the results, they’ve even included a DIY section with schematics. It also looks like they pulled some resources from the uCApps / MIDIbox open source project. First-time DIYers would probably have trouble with this, especially as the documentation is scant and in German, but I could see this as igniting a Lego revolution among those who do know what they’re doing.
Via Matrixsynth, via the beautiful gear-filled SoNiCbRaT.
If anyone has further insight into this, please do chime in in comments.
More MIDI projects:
Legos in the archives of the MAKE:blog (for endless Lego-based DIY hardware fun!); including, yes, a guitar made of Legos as pictured below
