Learn About Light Sensors for Homemade Synthesizers

Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Lorin Parker for Expert Village and we are working with a very simple oscillator here. Now this is really cool, and this is where this one becomes a lot of fun. Instead of using the ribbon which is kind of tweaky or the knob which is just a little bit too normal, and not too experimental, we're going to use this photocell. And this is the light dependent resistor, and see I have the leads going into pin 1 and pin 2. It's always going from pin1 to pin 2 through the resistor. And I've swapped out my capacitor. I decided that I wanted this to be lower frequency so I raised the capacitor value from .1 micro farads to 1 micro farad and I'm using this electrolytic capacitor that I showed earlier and we have it hooked up as I showed in the previous clip to a speaker. But now this light cell is going to be controlling the frequency of the oscillator. So now I'm going to take a flashlight and the farther away I get, the closer I get the higher. And this is very gratifying, this is definitely the poor man's theremin. And, in fact, those really, really, really cheap theremin kits that you see on eBay, the opto theremins, this is all they are generally, is an oscillator controlled by a photocell and it's about two bucks worth of parts and a flashlight. It's not technically a real theremin, it's a light controlled oscillator.

Community Members who...

• Favorited this Video
• Rated This Video

Top Tags