As you drive around, you may occasionally notice that your turn signals or windshield wipers happen to be in sync with the music. [Cranktown City] however, wanted to make sure his wipers would always match the beat, and set to work making it so.

After disassembling the wiper motor, the original circuit board of the controller is torn open, only used for the start position contacts, which help determine the position of the wipers. The battered board is then drilled out to fit a rotary encoder to track the wipers throughout their entire movement.

An Arduino is used to read the signal from the wiper rod to know which mode the wipers should be in, and uses a motor controller to drive the wipers in this way. It also reads the encoder contacts and start position to track the wiper movement and uses a proportional controller to control the wiper position. An MSGEQ7 spectrum analyzer is used to track the bass of the music to determine the beat to sync to.

The final build works, although in a different way than other designs we’ve seen. Instead of measuring and synchronizing BPM on a pulse of four to the floor, it simply follows the output of the lower band and thus is more reactive to funky drum beats.

It’s a fun way to customize your car, even if a piece needs to be cut out of the hood. If you’re cooking up your own cheeky car hacks, drop us a line. Video after the break.

This post Making windshield wipers rock to the beat

was original published at “https://hackaday.com/2022/03/31/making-windshield-wipers-rock-to-the-beat/”