Learn What Electronics are Used for Circuit Bending

Video Transcript

LORIN PARKER: And I'm going to talk to you a little bit about electronics and what types of electronics are best for circuit bending. Basically, as we said before, anything that is powered by batteries. The most gratifying tend to be toys that make a sound like this guy right here that's playing some really cheesy classical music, but also your old Sony Walkman. This is a Walkman Professional that really doesn't work so well anymore and this might be a good candidate for circuit bending because it's battery powered and I can remove--I see a few screws on the sides. I can remove the screws and I can get to circuitry. Likewise, any sort of dollar store or a cheaper or older radio works very, very, very well. You can get all kinds of strange alien tones out of a radio. And this one, I've already opened up and I've even removed some things from here, including accidentally ripping the connection that goes to the battery--oops! But in here, you can find all of your points that you're going to be touching and you're going to be connecting with alligator clips. Once again though, the key is that it should be simple, sort of consumer electronics that are battery-powered only, of course. And then beyond that, it's going to be a surprise usually when you open things up but you want to see a little bit of space in here. Here, we've got some pretty tightly-spaced circuits. Usually, the larger something is, the older something is, the easier it is going to be to manipulate. This radio with it's tiny, tiny, little leads is going to be a little bit harder to work with than say, a Speak & Spell from 198X which has larger components and a bigger circuit board. So, just go to the thrift store, look for any kind of consumer electronics item that's a little bit older and just a couple of bucks and just take it home, try it out. Basically, anything that makes noise and is powered by batteries makes a great candidate for circuit bending.

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