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.

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...