Learn What Components are Needed for Circuit Bending

Video Transcript

AMANDA CLAIRE: So the simplest type of circuit bending project would be one where you would take your gadget whatever it is. Your toy, or your keyboard, or your guitar effects pedal, whatever it is, open it up, explore the circuit board, find a couple of circuit points that are interesting to connect with wire, then you just solder a wire in there or few wires across the points that you know have the effect that you like, then you close it up and you're done. And that's cool! And you can do that. However, if you want--if you find that you want to be able to turn those bends on or off or if you want to be able to control the degree to which that bend occurs, you might going to want to invest in some components, and when I say components, I just mean things like switches , you know, on/off switches. There's a bunch different kinds of switches and we'll talk about them. Potentiometers. Potentiometers are also called pots for short. A potentiometer is basically you know is what is installed in your stereo as volume knob or as a tone knob or bass and trouble knob. You know, it kinda has a continuous range of motion. There are a lot of uses for them. If you want to be able to run your project into a speaker or an amplifier or maybe a recording studio, you're going to want maybe some audio jacks and here are some examples; 1/4-inch jacks, 1/8-inch jacks, banana-plug jacks. So these are some of the basic components that you want to use for circuit bending; switches, potentiometers, and jacks. If you get more advanced, there are some other things you can get into like--this is not really an advanced technique to put lights on. These are LED lights. LED (Light Emitting Diode). They are not hard to put in but they're not really necessary unless you need like an indicator light to tell you when something is on or off. So, you may or you may not want to do them for aesthetic reasons or you might not need to do them at all but that is something you ca do. There are some neat resistors you can buy called photoresistors, and what they do is--here's--and I'll pull out a really big one. They come in a bunch of different sizes, and we'll go through them in another clip in this series. Here's a large one. What it basically is is this little panel that's light-sensitive and depending on how much it is receiving, if you cover it up or if you shine a light into it, that controls how much voltage is going between the terminals here and so, those are cool for making basically you know circuit bend projects where you can shine light and when they were cover up light and sort of change the sound it makes. Then if you get really advanced, there's a lot of sort of prefabricated integrated circuits you can buy fairly inexpensively and install them into your project. This is a 555 timer, kind of a popular thing amongst circuit benders. It is used for producing rhythmic, kind of regular pulse or a kind of a like a timed series of electrical pulses and it's only a couple bucks in your local neighborhood store. It's this little black thing here. Advanced circuit benders like using these things. Don't worry about it now. But anyway, that's what components are; switches potentiometers, and jacks. Next, I'm going to talk about where you get these things from.

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