TransPiksel-Circuit Bending Resources

What is Circuit Bending?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZYNZ7JSn7Q

Circuit Bending tutorial:

Videos

Books on Circuit-Bending:

Q.R. Ghazala, Circuit-Bending

Simple stuff. Big figures, a little scarce on content, but OK as an introduction.

Nicolas Collins: Handmade Electronic Music: The Art Of Hardware Hacking

Totally recommended. Not only circuit-bending, but loads of other great projects.

Artists web pages:

Dave Wright

Sailormouth

Q.R. Ghazala

Getlofi

LFO (low frequency oscillator, 555-based)

This image was grabbed from the net and I forgot from where. I think it might have been mikmo.dk, which is no longer available. Shame. Solder it on vero board, or build tests on breadboards. The main purpose of this circuit is to trigger sounds in the same way as pressing the buttons of the toy, but in a pulse, incredibly fast or slow. This usually works, but not always. The LFO-circuit must be powered by the toy (they must share the same power supply), then connect the “trigger out” to the positive solder point of the buttons of the toy. Other connections may be interesting too.

Line out: Add audio output jack to your bent toy.

Simple version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHYrASBqbOg

(note: you might want to put a 1K resistor in parallel and another small resistor in series if the output is too “hot”. Experiment with values. Removing the speaker or disabling it with the jack may give undesired results.)