Tengu Clone

Posted Oct 22nd 2007 10:38PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: portable audio hacks

[Alex] sent in his clone of [Crispin Jones]' tengu. The tengu is essentially a funky visual sound meter that looks like it's lip syncing. [Alex]'s version is built around an ATMega48 microcontroller, an electric mic with a LM386 audio circuit and the required LED matrix display. There's an example tengu video here - but I'm not sure what to say about the song in the demo. It's not dependent on USB - it actually works better with the clean power provided by batteries anyway.

Reader Comments

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1. That’s pretty neat use of a LED matrix. I might see about doing something like that myself. I currently have a 8×8 bicolor LED matrix hooked up to an AVR, so far I’ve written a simple pong game.

A video is included here:
http://blog.davr.org/2007/09/24/avr-project-update/

Posted at 3:04AM on Oct 23rd 2007 by davr

2. Looking at the breadboards, I don't see any bypass caps. Maybe he could get away with USB power if he threw 100uF across the bus bars of each board and .1uF near Vdd/Vss on the chips.

Posted at 9:37AM on Oct 23rd 2007 by Pokey

3. first time i heard of tengu and this is something i've been wanting for years now.. the clone lacks the "bling" original has, (probably due to designers being involved in the original and all) and both can use a little more fine tuning of responses but overall, this is the coolest "world can do without" item i've ever seen..

p.s. i actually considered buying a tengu but the website is completely in japanese with no english preference and my link reading skills were only so much..

Posted at 2:05AM on Oct 24th 2007 by norm

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