Welcome to Circuit Bending 101

First instruction is “Don’t lick your fingers”

At the weekend I was lucky enough to be able to head along to a circuit bending workshop for beginners held at static gallery.

The Shape of the day

We started with a 20 minute introduction to soldering, and believe me I needed it never having soldered before, well at least not since my youth. And licking fingers was a part of it as in DON’T – the flux and solder is not very healthy.

However I had nothing to fear, my soldering was good once I understood the rudiments and any mistakes can simply be melted away. I even showed my join to our workshop leader like a schoolboy in need of approval from Teacher.

 

We started work on the first of three projects we would be doing throughout the day. It was the cheapest musical toy you had ever seen infact the cheapness of the toys was a theme that ran through the day. Well as Nikki said only move onto expensive items until you really know what you are doing. We opened up this first toy sliced out the original resistor to replace it with a light sensitive resistor – that give you the first bit of screeching on the audioboo below.  Thankfully, we all had instructions with little drawings of what the parts looked like and where to make cuts to the resistors. We moved on after lunch to the circular toy below (it did have a big push me cap on top) – now surprisingly once we had completed the first toy there was no problem with following the instructions and moving on to create second hellish creation – (that is if you like to follow instructions) – so of course I kept on asking questions of teacher but we were all in the same boat. This was trickier though as we had to make room for an audio out jack socket and a big potentiometer ( I now know this is called a pot) and a couple of touch transistors. Luckily there was a @cheapjack  with a large drill to help us make the holes for the pot and audio jack.  And on the second half of the audioboo you can listen to the consequences of that.

 

We did move on to a third project but we didn’t quite get it complete – we will hold that one over till makernight where all the brave and the good go to solder their magical wares. Join us.

A big thanks to Nikki who was a great workshop leader and even proved to be honest when she said at the outset that she was no expert – it was a perfectly pitched.

Also another big thanks goes to Soundnetwork and Ross Dalziel for organising this workshop and then subsequently to PRS Foundation as they supported Soundnetwork to undertake such projects. And you can check out Ross’s video here http://youtu.be/j2GSDmq7X44