Pet Sematary
Idea
On our excursuíon to the electro waste recycling yard, I've found a ton of electrical puppys and cuddle toys. Non was working on default, but with changing the batteries or fixing a broken cable, most of them came back to live pretty easyly. Turned out, the sounds they made by default, where fantasticly creapy. Apart from the fact that such an outrageous sound is quite questionable as a children's toy, the sound was very much to my taste.
First and intentional idea was to create an organ of electric cuddle pets. It's still a desirable idea, to have a keyboard, with which you can trigger/gate individual, circuit bended toys and play them as a choir with the addition of having other possiblities to tweek the cuircit bended modifications on individual Toys.
Turning a single toy on and off is easy implemented with a simple button, which builds the connection to a power source.
Circuit Bending Process
Usualy, there is a chip in this toys. This brain of the circuit is mostly protected by a black plastic dot, which is not possible to remove, without risking to destroy the circuit. But the pcb tracks, coming from or leading to this chips are easy indicators to the circuits components, which are worth a try of tweeking. As it is the easiest to change a resistor to a variable resistor. I've tryied to shortcut all resistors leading to the chip with a low value resistor. By making notes, what happens if i do so, I tried to get an overview of what my tweekable options on an individual toy are.
Here, you can see some notes of bending possibilities from the "schnurrBär". e.x.: if you put a varible resistor between pin 2 and 5 you can implement a distorted tone. Inserting a button to connect 1 and 4, you achieve a farting sound.
The "Schnurrbär" was my favourite Toy. It was also the one, I've spend the most time in. Its special pleasing sound was a purring/snoring sound. Which was not a sample saved on a chip. It was the only one without a hidden chip. Its snoring sound was a analog circuit, which gave a variety of differents sounds thru tweeking it. Other pets, which were bases on stored samples, mostly just offed the possibity to change the clock, with which the sample was read. These leads into a pitchshifting effect. Sadly the "Schnurrbär did not survive the last bend, which should be the "wtf"-button.
Also the "sad cat", the "dasy puddle" and the " pink puddle" died under my operations.
I ended up on a pitchshiftable rock n roll Christmasbear with a "full pitch up"-button for the concert.
Also I went into filter circuits, specialy ladderfilter circuits, which I still explore and try to build for my modular system.