There are many ways to take an electrical audio signal and turn it into something you can hear. Moving coil speakers, plasma domes, electrostatic speakers, piezo horns, the list goes on. Last week at the Electromagnetic Field festival in the UK, we encountered another we hadn’t experienced directly before. Bite on a brass rod (sheathed in a drinking straw for hygiene), hear music.
The TOG Skull Radio demo box
This was Skull Radio, a bone conduction speaker courtesy of [Tdr], one of our friends fromTOG hackerspace in Dublin, and its simplicity hid a rather surprising performance. A small DC motor has its shaft connected to a piece of rod, and a small audio power amplifier drives the motor. Nothing is audible until you bite on the rod, and then you can hear the music. The bones of your skull are conducting it directly to your inner ear, without an airborne sound wave in sight.
Read the full story over on their website. https://hackaday.com/2016/08/17/bone-conduction-skull-radio/#comment-3139160
A bunch of us headed to an event last weekend called Electromagnetic Field in the UK. EMF is a 3 day camping festival held every two years with over a thousand people attending. The weekend is filled with talks, workshops and lots of crazy art installations. We teamed up with other hackers from Ireland to form our own little village to have a place to call home for the weekend. Our members kept themselves busy over the weekend by adding to the lineup with their own talks and workshops check out below.
Receiving live video from the Space station – Daniel Cussen
EMF had a full program of events to keep all the kids entertained. We ran our bridge building competition with the young hackers of EMF. Congratulations to the hope bridge on their win.
One of the big stumbling blocks of our new space has been the slow internet speed. We have been hit delays in getting a suppler into the space. For the last few months we have been living on 4G mobile broadband only. We are happy to say, we now have proper internet in the space. Ask any member for the key the next time you are in the space.
Our own member Jeffrey Roe went on this weeks Tech Central Podcast. It had been seven years since Nail and Jeffrey catch up about the goings on about our space.
We recently ran a Electronic “Build-It” Workshop. We have twelve build a line following robot. The little robot was an all analog device, not an arduino insight. Check out the photos from the workshop in our gallery and the video below of them inaction.
Join our mailing list to keep upto date with our workshops over the summer.
The car park outside our space has just been repainted. When visiting you can park in any of the spaces marked Caminio Ways. For more snaps visit our gallery.