Circuit Bent Toy for Easter

My son bought this for I think a pound at a charity shop and wanted to try Circuit bending himself so we did this together. It's not a great candidate for bending, and I would say its a slightly unwilling participant in our plans. Having said that I might use it in a recording perhaps and it does have a good range of crazyness, if you're willing to put up the limitations.

The components inside are those tiny micro-resistor things, and the only bend I could find was Pitch, but it crashes out a lot at the top end, and the pitch is not that good in range.

So basically we've added a switch to enable the bend, a pot to control pitch, and a reset button, as there needed to be a quick way to reset it when it crashes.

Due to the lack of room in the casing, there was no opportunity for an output jack, and the controls has to be fitted to the back of the toy. This makes it a little tricky to operate but you can produce some weird noises etc.

Here are some pics, and a video.

LFO Project

Low Frequency Oscillator (LFO)

I built this LFO to use with the Bendinator 3 but actually i think it will be much better suited to the Bendinator 2, and the new version i'm building Bendinator 2.2 which will be the same but with a port for the LFO.

Inside I have a 555 Timer Circuit with a LED coupled to a LDR (Light Dependant Resistor) then connected to the jack socket. The LED and LDR are encased in a blob of modelling clay, if this is ever scanned by Airport security or taken apart by the Police it's not going to look good. There are four AA batteries in a battery clip, and obviously the connections to the switch and Pot.