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...