Tengu Clone


[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.

3 thoughts on “Tengu Clone

  1. 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.

  2. 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..

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