The time will come when you need to have some distance between sections of your project, or you just need a remote way of interfacing to it. Peter Jakab has developed this Infrared or Radio Remote Control Project which should fit the bill. If you have line of sight you can use IR to create the link, if you don’t you can simply use RF. The existing design has a remote unit that is able to manipulate relay contacts on the main system but the same concept could be used to transmit data to the main system for any other purpose. Peter has provided full schematics and code so you can easily build your own.

“Control up to 8 devices by this easy constructable remote control. It can work as a radio or infrared remote control, depending on the components. Each device output can be configured to be momentary (turned on while you press the button) or latched. Latched outputs can be toggled on/off by one button per channel, or turned on and off by two buttons per channel.”

Looks like the hardware on the Rigol DS1052E Oscilloscope is identical to the more expensive 100MHz DS1102E version. Nice thing about that is with a few commands you can make your 50MHz scope into a 100MHz scope!

Check out this cool VISIONS OF THE AMEN art exhibit. The Strings are attached to motors which are modulated based on the pitch and volume of the singer. I can imagine something like this on stage at a concert, with lots of cool lighting it would be an incredible effect. Thanks Michell “A sculpture built around the property of spinning strings sweeping out sine waves. The really clever part is that the matrix of strings is sound-activated, sensitive to volume AND pitch, and, in this video, is animated by a really beautiful vocal arrangement of Bjork’s “Unison.” On a technical level, the responsiveness of the strings is achieved by sending a microphone feed in the sculpture to a custom software written in Processing by the artist. The software identifies, in real-time, the pitch and volume of the audio input, and based on that data uses an algorithm to determine PWM values for each of the 16 motors attached to strings in the joists above the viewer. The sofware end of the project is very similar to a sound visualization program, but with a serial output to an array of Arduino microcontrollers rather than a screen display. Earlier verisons of the project have run on the ArtBus microcontroller currently being developed by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.”