The Creative Hardware Magazine
Arduino, ESP32, Raspberry Pi, LED installations, robotics, and the fabrication tools turning code into objects.
Perfboard and jumper wires only get a project so far. KiCad is free, open source, and genuinely production-grade — and getting a first two-layer board manufactured costs less than a night out.
Most synth knobs are silent potentiometers. The MD-7's two motorized discs shove back at your fingers to tell you where you are in a parameter — and when the hardware ships in September, its entire firmware is going open source.
Most controller keyboards make you choose between deep DAW control and a full piano-sized keybed. Novation's new Launchkey 88 MK4 finally puts the whole MK4 toolkit under seven-plus octaves of semi-weighted keys.
The original blackbox turned a palm-sized box into a whole sampling studio. The blackbox 2, shipping now, doubles the horsepower, adds a bigger touchscreen, and can finally run on batteries — the feature everyone asked for.
A generative artwork usually lives on a screen. A pen plotter drags it into the physical world — a robot arm drawing your code in real ink on real paper, wobbles and all. It's become one of the most beloved tools in generative art.
The interesting design decision isn't that it uses AI — it's that the AI is scoped tightly to one machine's actual physical limits instead of pretending those limits don't exist.
No cloud connection, no laptop tether — just a chip, a screen, and an infinite non-repeating number doing the creative work.