This project formed somewhat subconsciously and ended up consuming nearly a year of my life. Building a boom box from the ground up that was a lithium polymer powered, class D, 2.1 channel, DSP controlled, touch screen, bluetooth (the list goes on) portable speaker was one helluva job.
After spotting the IceLight on a photography website I set my heart on getting one. The only problem was the relativity high asking price for what was essentially just a torch. After doing a quick bit of poking around on ebay and in my parts drawers, I decided I could make one for a quarter of the price. Best of all I get a new project to stick my teeth into and engineer from the ground up - one of most satisfying things I know of. When it works.
This was my creation for the project module in my final year of university. It took a lot of work to get it to a point were it was actually an enjoyable experience to make music with it, rather than being cumbersome and awkward. The core of the hardware is an Arduino Mega, which is controlled by software written in Max/MSP. The finished product and documentation actually won me the 'best final year project' award in the faculty of technology, so I was very pleased the hard work paid off.
It took 7 months of construction, but ever since it was finished it became our home. You'd end up working till the early hours in the morning on a song, sleeping on a sofa overnight and starting it all over again the next day. So this is a brief picture diary of its construction. Unfortunately I didn't have the foresight to use a decent camera to take some construction photographs, so the majority of the images are from Duncan's old phone. Generally, they aren't too bad though and you get the idea.