Electronics

Breadboards, electronic oscillator circuits and playing noise with light.

We have been using breadboards to prototype circuits and experiment with different says of changing the signal and producing sound.

I tried a variety of resistors to see their effect on the frequency. Touch Sensors, light sensors, potentiometer.

Ive found that my experience of using Max and the concept of signal flow to be very helpful at getting to grips with how electrical current works.

Something Ive certainly learn about electronics is that making mistakes can be a bit of a pain.

In the image on the left I forgot to make enough space for wires after realising that the board didn’t have the same setup as the breadboard that I prototyped on. This meant I just had to start again as unfortunately there is no ctrl-z in real life 🙁

The synth on the right did successfully produce sound however some of the soldering was a bit shoddy and so it was difficult to keep everything in place and working. This could be easily resolved however I am not too worried about fixing it right now. The touch strip has a high frequency range and was modulated by the pot.

I found the Bela boards interesting, but didn’t get much chance to use it in our group.

Cycling’74 recently released a new patching environment in max called RNBO that can be used to export and create VST and AUs, export to Bela boards and Raspberry Pi’s (like blokas pisound), and more interesting to me, to export to web, so that you could create your own interactive synthesiser embedded into a website (while still creating the code using the visual language of Max)

Although I have found all our lessons on electronics to be interesting and have enjoyed them, I likely won’t be creating any hardware for this project.

I do generally have an affinity to software as user experience does interest me, and due to the availability of personal computers and free open-source software I find it to be more accessible the the manufacturing of hardware (hardware-hacking and DIY-repurposing is another story though, and I believe should be a focus when dealing with electronics our current times)

I can’t seem to find any actual reference to it but I seem to remember hearing the phrase plunder-tronics in reference to hardware hacking in the past and feel that it would work quite well as a phrase as a hardware parallel to plunder-phonics, I think maybe some wires may have got crossed as I can’t actually find any use of the term in this context.