Circuit Challenge
Oct 28 was the Circuit Challenge as posted on GetLoFi and Create Digital Music
I knew that the dollar store had plenty of toys to play with, so I figured I would try it out.
Here are the toys opened up. The phone seemed the most interesting, but the board cracked and could not be repaired, so I went on to the truck.
Playing around, it turns out that the touch pad reacts with the +3 voltage.
Additionally, the resistor for the timing is connected already to +3. That makes it really easy to change the value. The resistor is removed and replaced with a pot.
This Youtube shows me triggering the sample and speeding it up.
Sample of the original sound is here.
Sample with speed changes.
The next YouTube has the circuit connected to the breadboard and amp. Im using a pot to change the sound.
Heres the final circuit (or well…as much as I had time to muck with it).
The 40106 was used to square off the signal. It provided an additional gate to make an oscillator. This was connected to the trigger so that it could be continually looped.
I discovered that if the IC side of the timing resistor was set to ground, the sound stopped. I had hoped to make a stutter effect by connecting the inverter to the oscillator…but that didn’t work.
Considering thats its basically a blob-ic with just voltage and timing parts, theres not too much that can be done with just switches. There is a flashing light on the board. I had considered swapping that with a varistor feeding back to the timing resistor for a cool vibrato effect or connecting that for a tremolo.
Body contacts would be nice, but I opted to just mess with the output with the ICs I had sitting on my bench.
I used the 4024 as a counter to drop the sound by a few octaves. Since the sound was so glitchy to start with though, it was hard to hear that happening. The NAND was used to nand together various outputs for a ring-modulation effect. Kinda.
The best sounds were when it was REALLY slow.
Here is a sample connecting to various pins on the counter
Here is a sample through the NAND IC.
Here is a sample with the timing REALLY slow…and lots of tweaking.