In the spirit of earth day and keeping old toys out of the landfills Tommy Stephenson and Patrick McCarthy hosted a free bending workshop in Chicago on Saturday, April 25th. It was great to know that this community is alive and well and growing in the midwest. It was cool to meet Austin (aka Creme Dementia) who had a slick electronic bird calender tweaked on the workbench. He also had a selection of his contact mics for sale. I picked one up and from messing around with it for a about 15 minutes I realize that I ‘m going to want to purchase several more. Tons of potential for amplifying objects. It was also great to meet Alex Deeba from Get LoFi.com. He has a ton of sweet project kits for sale on his site. He was sticking one of his precision oscillators into an old school game boy to tweak it’s clock. Good stuff.
I’m glad I stumbled upon this event… looking forward to others.
Several projects are well under way and I spent some time case building this weekend. I realized that most of my projects actually start out by visualizing how the completed piece or gear will look. I then sketch this out and make sure that I order the necessary hardware for the cases. Often times while building the circuit the controls and layout will change, but I try to stick to the original sketch as much as possible.
I’m trying a couple different case configurations to match my original concept sketches. Here you can see the Stepped Tone Generator (aka - Atari Punk Console) original sketch and then beginning case build.
Next steps are to sand and finish the wood, Cut, bend and drill the control panel. Then print and attach the lables. Going to try to accompnish all the this week so I can assemble and complete next weekend.
The Circuit board has arrived for the Weird Sound Generator. Looking forward to getting this thing underway. It looks like there could be a lot of potential for some interesting experimenting beyond what is documented. Notice the “Experiment Kludge Area” on the board…. a very conciderate touch. I ordered parts from several electronics stores in a mission to see how much cheaper I could build it compared to the $90 price of the full component kit. It’s around $50 cheaper at this point, without the case.
Here’s a quick video of the completed Photo Trans-Actovator. As you can see this thing is highly sensitive to light. In the demo I’m using my hands to shadow the photo sensors and also turning on and off ambient light will have a drastic effect. enjoy.
