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...

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...

First Circuit Bent Toy

This is the first toy I ever successfully bent. I've been really lazy about getting my circuit bent stuff online. I'm over that now, so I figured this would be the best place to start.

I was about to give up on the whole bending toys thing and life all together until this came together so well. There were so many mods I was able to find just by poking around with one lead connected to the pitch resistor. So many that I decided to use a rotary switch so I could use them all.

The mods from top to bottom and left to right are :

• N.C. Momentary Reset Button
• Low Frequency Oscillator Rate Knob
• LFO Depth and Shape Knobs
• LFO ON/OFF Switch and Rate Indicator Light
• Rotary Potentiometer Glitch Selector Switch
• 1/4" Mono Jack Out
• Glitch ON/OFF Switch
• Glitch/Pitch Knob

Here is what the inside looks like.

The Low Frequency Oscillator is from Getlofi.com, but the I used the schematic from Casperelectronics.com under the Speak n' Spell section. I just replaced the point on the Speak n' Spell in the schematic with the pitch resistor on whatever generic toy this is.

If I was smarter at the internet, I would find a way to upload some audio. You can see what points the rotary switch goes to on the board. They basically just drop the pitch in different ways. Some of them cause it to loop over and over. I put trim pots on the pitch knob because it will crash if it gets too low.

I've seen a handful of these things bent online. Some of them have had distortion mods but there was no audio so they very well could be the same bends here. It doesn't seem like there is a lot else you can do with this thing. Although, this was the first thing I did so maybe I could find some more in there if I came back to it.

Here are some more photos of it's insides...