Rosa Forza Ronzio Palla

This is the first thing I've ever built that I was able to sell. I spent a lot of time working on the led display for this it. They flash so bright and so fast, it's almost seizure inducing.

There are four oscillators from a 40106 chip and a low pass filter using a 741 op amp. The filter is taken from MFOS Weird Sound Generator. Each oscillator corresponds to a different color. They each have an on/off switch and a high/low switch.

It has a volume knob and a voltage sag knob. There is a push button next to the power switch that also turns it on. When you push it, you can hear the big capacitor fill and empty quickly.

The low pass filter has fine and coarse frequency cut off knobs and a resonance knob.

Here it is pre-paint job...

And post paint job...

 

Here is a look at the insides...

 

 Here is a close up look at the led display... 

 

Here is the circuit board...

This is the schematic for the low pass filter I used from the Weird Sound Generator.

Finally, here is a video of it...

El Pedo Ruidoso Espumosos

I've built things for pretty much everyone I know at this point. This is one of those things. I really like the tone that comes out of this thing. The paint job is also really cool. I got this like turquoise spray paint. Then I used some glitter, not that cheap dollar store glitter, the fancy kind. The kind that is super small and if you spill it, you will never get it cleaned up.

I used the Pico Paso schematic from Bleep Labs. They have so much cool shit.

Here it is...

I've never had something I've built that fit together so well. Where everything is easily accessible and the case opens and closes nice and easy.

Here is it's insides...

I changed some of the capacitor values and I added high/low switches for each capacitor. I changed the values to 1uf and .22uf for one and .1uf and .33uf for the other. The original LFO capacitor was supposed to be 10uf.

I added a switch that would let you switch between that and a 1uf capacitor. I added switches in addition to the buttons that turned on oscillators that lock them on.

The knob in the lower right hand corner is kind of a voltage sag. I used a 5k pot for it. It lowers the overall pitch and works a bit as a volume knob too.

Here is the Bleep Labs schematic...



If you have never been to bleeplabs.com, leave this page and go there right now. You can watch a video of their pico paso there and hear how awesome it sounds.

I should have a video of this in action somewhere. I'll post it up here if I ever find it...

The Duke Whiskers Melody Generator

This is just a slacker melody generator in a awesome case. I found the schematic for this in an intro to lunetta document. Here is the link:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1V9qerry_PsXTZqt_UDx7C-wcuMe_6_gyy6M_MyAgQoA/edit

Its a great read. For some reason everytime I've tried to build one of these since they don't work. Fortunately, this one did. Unfortunately, I can't find the video of it working.

The three switches turn the three oscillators on and off respectively. The three knobs on the right control the rate of those oscillators. The knob on the left controls the clock speed and the switch below is the power switch.

Here is the schematic I used for this. I used a 40106 for the A,B, & C inputs and for the clock input.

Mantra Prayer Chant Box

I have had this thing sitting around forever and I finally did something with it. I am really really happen with the way it turned out. My wife hates it because I would play with it all day if I could. I'm surprised she hasn't tried to hide it from me yet.

I ended up recasing it from its original box. The box it was in was too small to add anything else to it.

I drilled little holes in the top of the lid where I hot glued the speaker. It made it a lot louder. I think I'm going to add a speaker off switch and a 1/8" output jack eventually.

This is the original box it was encased in. I still like this box and I will probably keep it for something else.

Here is the bottom of the top. There is a On/Off/On SPDT switch that switches between normal, low, and high pitch. There is also a momentary button that switches between the songs, mantras, chants, prayers, or whatever you want to call them. I used a 1M pot for the pitch. The pitch is connected to one of the pins of the momentary switch so when you push it, the pitch will change. For example, if you have the pitch low, it will go to high and vice versa. It doesn't do that for normal pitch though.

Here is a video of it in action....

Circuit Bent iCarly Toy

Bending this was a major headache. I might have added more to it, but the resistors used for it were surface mount. They were TINY. The traces on the board started coming off. I ended up with a teeny tiny spot to solder a wire to and I ended up having to hot glue it in place.

I would have taken a photo of the inside, but I would be afraid that I wouldn't be able to get it back together again. There is not alot to see anyway. I have to use an iPhone to take these photos and they are never right side up.

Here is a video of it in action...

First Circuit Bent Toy Video!

I finally recorded a video of the first toy I ever bent. It is a little long, but there is a lot of different sounds it can make so it was kinda hard to squeeze it all in.

Here it is...

The Chaos Box

I created this for a friend back home, like 90% of everything I make.

It's three 555 oscillators a 1M pot each for for the osc rate and then three 100K pots that control the way the oscillators affect each other. I drilled sereval different size holes for the speaker on the right hand side. I pulled apart a cup that was designed to hold pens to make a screen for the speaker. I'm really happy with the whole aesthetic of it. There is also a LM386 chip in there too. It helps make it nice and loud.

I used 10k resistors from pin 7 to pin 8 on each of the three 555. The capacitors I used were .022uf, .22uf, and 2.2uf. The first two values were mylar caps and the last one was electrolytic.

I used a 1k pot for the voltage starve pot on the left hand side. Originally I was just hoping it would work as sort of a volume knob, but it ended up adding a cool distortion effect as well.

When I first added the three 100k pots, I just intended them to just kind of affect the pitch in a different way by varying the resistance from pin 7 to pin 8. I also didn't put the diodes in between the three different outputs from each 555 at first either. After I was running it for awhile I noticed the chips all got crazy hot. The oscillators started feeding back into each other and i was lucky they didn't melt. So I added the diodes and added fixed resistors in between pin 7 and pin 8. I found out that the three 100k pots now affected the way the oscillators mixed with each other. Here is a very basic diagram of how the pots work.

Here is a video of it in action...

Weird Sound Generator

This is my first post after a long holiday. I expected to had gotten a lot more stuff built that what I did. I was only able to build two things out of like the six things I wanted to build. One of the things I was able to finish was a Weird Sound Generator from MFOS for a friend of mine. Although when I mailed it, the stupid post office punted it all the way to Illinois and broke the battery connection.

I'm not smart enough to label the differences in the knobs in the switches in the two voices. Especially since they only label everything in the diagram as zany and wacky. The only thing I was able to figure out was that the black knobs with the silver tops are the rate knobs for the oscillators for each voice.

The silver bumps on the back are body contacts to some random points on the circuit board.

The coolest part of this by far is the low pass filter. I would like to build a stand alone low pass filter from this device. Here is a schematic for the filter...

Here is a video of it in action...

The Spidey Synth

This is another instrument I built for a friend, because if I don't build it for someone else, it never gets finished. I have boxes and boxes of unfinished projects for myself.

Anyway, here it is...

When I saw the tiny spider man lunchbox at the store, I knew it would be perfect. I'm really happy with the way this turned out. 

Here is another angle...

Here is the schematic I used for it...

The only differences are that I added a switch in between pins 2 and 3 that selected between a photocell and the pot in the schematic, and another switch that selects between a 0.1uf ceramic cap and 1uf electrolytic cap on the first oscillator.

I've already given this one away so I can't make any recordings of it. I made a video though, just pretend like it isn't almost upside down...

Coleco Talking Teacher

When I originally bent this I only included a pitch knob, body contacts, and about 8 glitch switches. Which was okay, but I had seen schematics online that had used more. So I decided to take a second look. I used some stuff from a few things I've seen online and some other stuff I poked out myself.

Without further dudes...

From top to bottom, left to right...

• 1/4" Output Jack
• 5PDT Rotary Potentiometer Glitch Selector
• Distortion Knob
• Tone Momentary Push Button
• 2 Glitch ON/OFF Switches, connected to rotary switch
• Long Glitch Knob
• Hold Switch and Audition Button

Just like above...

• Pitch Photocell
• Photocell ON/OFF Switch
• Coarse Pitch Knob
• Fine Pitch Knob
• Barely Visible Reset Button

Originally, I just removed the pitch trimpot and replaced it with a 100k pot. The pitch range was okay but removing the resistor next to the trimpot really opens up the range. You have you replace it with a jumper wire though. I used a 500k pot for the coarse knob and a 50k pot for the fine pitch. You could just split the difference and use a trimpot if you want. You could probably just leave the original trimpot and just remove the resistor, but I lost it after I removed it the first time.

Here is the inside and a diagram of the bends...

You can see I had to remove ribbon cable to the LCD screen because it broke. I had to rewire it and it was a pain. The ribbon cable is really finnicky so you have to be careful with it.

  

Its kind of a sloppy mess but oh well. You can see the jumper wire used when I removed the pitch resistor. The three black wires on the left are for the body contacts.

Here's a video...