Many of us tap our fingers or a writing implement when bored (or, more recently, spin bearings around). Although this type of musical creation method is likely as old as mankind itself, here’s a device to take your tapping skills to the next level, a beat looper that repeats your tapped rhythm.
As described in its product listing, you tap a pattern into its tiny speaker up to 12 beats long, and once you’ve repeated this pattern three times it will continue beeping in the same sequence. The device also shows the tempo in beats per minute, which can be adjusted via two buttons.
It’s an interesting device, but how do they handle the record and playback? It’s open source so you can not only play with it, but learn from the source code and do some modification for your own projects. An interesting idea be adding an aux cable jack for use in a performance, or you could even hook up the output using a transistor setup in order to actuate a physical device (or devices), as seen in this Kickstarter from daddamachines! You could even use something like this as a Morse code repeater, though you’d need some way to signify long and short taps.