The BBC have stopped by our offices at Tinker.it! to review a bunch of different Arduino projects. There was a great deal of gaffer taping, shuffling about, rigging lights, posing and sweating. The upside will be much better quality video footage of the Brockenspiel in action than there is already - and I didn’t even have to open up Final Cut Pro to do it. After being coaxed to explain what a microcontroller is in the simplest terms possible (and several takes to get it right), I think I could hardly put two words together anymore.

But the video turned out pretty good anyway…

Last year at Dorkbot London I gave a demonstration of the Brockenspiel and fielded a few questions afterwards. Some clever guy in the audience asked if I could hook up a bar code reader - a thought I’d had but not implemented. When I said it would probaly work just fine, as long as the serial protocol is the same, someone in the audience called out “Hang on a minute, I’ve got a barcode reader around here!” (Only at Dorkbot!) Hidden in the depths of Limehouse Town Hall, he hauled out the reader, and by a stroke of luck, it worked. We were playing the music on beer bottles in a matter of minutes. Later, I made a quick video to demonstrate the concept.

Brockenspiel Bar Codes from Brock Craft on Vimeo.

Well I’ve finally got round to posting some video of the Brockenspiel doing its thing. I’ll be discussing how it works in more detail at Dorkbot, but you can get a little preview of the action below. If you can make it to the event, you’ll have a chance to try out your own swipecard and discover what song is encoded on it.

The Brockenspiel from Brock Craft on Vimeo.

Well, the Brockenspiel’s been running for about 6 months now without any real hitches - 3xcept when somebody pulled the power supply out. The only thing not quite right is the mounting system for the tubes and a couple of slaphappy solenoids. Got to get round to posting that video… Looks like I’ll be demoing the brockenspiel at Dorkbot London in April.

The song player, now dubbed the “Brockenspiel” has been installed here at the lab. It’s nice to see it up and running. Still have a few things to work out. In particular, the Arduino board seems to fall over after a few days. The first time this happened I had to remove the board, rewrite the software and re-install it. This fixed the problem. Still need to determine whether this is a coding issue or a hardware design flaw.