And a picture of the little theremin that couldn't.

Or could, but only once.

Emergency glasses look like this

Basically a bunch of resistors and leds in only the classiest of sunglasses.

Emergency Glasses

Well, by now everyone knows, but I gave up on rebuilding the theremin on the fourth try, and put a bunch of LED's in my sunglasses. I just put 16 of them, so I could still see... I think if I do this again, which I actually want to (!) I'm going to have them facing so the tip of the light is going out and completely actually get rid of the clear lens part of the sunglasses so you can see the LED's better. They work okay surprisingly, especially surprisingly because the last 5 or 6 solders were not soldered, the shop closed so I twisted wires and duct taped them.

woo!

pictures up soon, once I get them off my camera.

Why Can't I, Electronics?

Well, I worked from 2-7:30 today on the thing, ruined 3 more of my tiny 555 ic's, was told we had bigger ones... Wish I had thought to look earlier, I wouldn't have been doing it now. Lon short is that I rebuilt the thing twice, never had it work.

I also ran out of 0.1 uf capacitors, and so has the shop.
I have 4 hours and 40 minutes tomorrow to get it working.

wrenches in things

Well, one of the legs broke off one of the tiny tiny 555 ics, so now the thing completely doesn't work. I did order a couple more last week. So for now, I'm hoping that they show up. Also the thing was wicked wicked quiet, so I might need to try a different speaker. I scrounged a couple from a phone I found behind Cole but I have no idea if they're the right kind for this.
We'll see.

Planning on cutting the ball open with a hacksaw. I really wish things had gone smoother so I could have had more time to get things more impressive.

Insanity Ball

Okay, the current idea, and hopefully what I actually end up making is this optical theremin and putting it inside one of the semitransparent large bouncy balls in my room, so that when it rolls it makes different noises. The photocells could be pointed at one side, so that when it rolls they face up toward light and then down in their shadow... it seems like the effect could be interesting.
That said, I still haven't got any of my parts yet! They need to show up.

So the project has changed! sort of. Back to closer to what it was going to be before.
It's going to be an optical theremin, but I'm going to do something crazy with it. Ideas for the something crazy right now include a clear pvc sword which changes what it sounds like when you wave it around, a really annoying mousepad, and an alarm clock that screams if you for using the snooze button. That last one might be hard because... it'd be screaming all night unless I figured out how to rig a timer up to it. I don't really know.

I like the sword idea, just because it'd be fun and I know I could probably get started on the non-electronic part at home over break, since my electronic parts haven't shown up yet.

what do?

SO, I think I'm making a theremin. Although... I have really pretty limited experience, and I don't really understand how they work. However, I know there are all kinds of kits and instructions and schematics floating around, if I can make sense of them. all else fails, I can probably fall back to some kind of fancier optical theremin, although I think I might be disappointed by that as a project.

Hi, I'm Tom. This blog will be about my final project for my creative electronics class, and about choosing what that will be.

My first project, which was intended to be a box with 25 LED lights which could each be individually turned on or off with button switches, so the user could write letters or draw smiley faces or patterns. What I actually built was very similar to that. I ended up with a board of 30 LED's and 30 button switches inside a plastic bag. The bag's opacity helped make the drawn shapes more clear... I found that when you could see all the lights, even the ones turned off, it was harder to make out what you had drawn. I went with 30 lights simply because I had extra parts.

The most important things I learned from the project were soldering and how to get parts. I had some limited experience soldering before, but not very much, and this project required somewhere around 150 solders the way I went about it, and the number of times I messed up. I feel very, very comfortable soldering now, and it's much more enjoyable now that I'm not bad at it. I also had very little experience ording parts- my few previous electronics projects had been made from mostly found parts or a few things bought at RadioShack. I was completely amazed at how easy it was to get a whole bunch of push button switches from digikey to my room. Definitely a good resource to know about.

One thing I hope to do next time is be more ambitious. I feel like my project was far more technically simple than others... That said, I feel like my project was far more successful than most of the more technical ones... Mine worked in every way it was supposed to two days before the deadline, and just needed a new casing. So I'll try to be a little more ambitious this next time.

For now, I'm thinking I want to do something with sound for the next one. Light and sound seem to me like the fundamentals of electronic messingaroundage. They seem to be very small levels of the cool stuff you can do with relatively simple electronics. So I want to do both.