How to Open Electronics for Circuit Bending

Video Transcript

LORIN PARKER: And we're going to open up a toy and actually start doing some circuit bending. So, I'm going to start with my screwdriver and the toy I've chosen here. As you can see, it is $2.99 at my local thrift store. It's just this little classical music playing toy for infants. I started out by opening this up. It had four screws here. I have narrowed it down to just one. Sometimes it takes patience. Sometimes these will have a lot of screws. Sometimes they'll just have one. Sometimes they'll have screws and a little bit of glue. Just--if you do find some glue or you're having some trouble getting these things opened, just have patience and kinda tug. Sometimes you need to pry it a little bit but don't worry too much about the case. We can always put the electronics inside of a different case. Here, also, we have a battery compartment that's protected by a screw. So, I might want to open that up just to make sure I can get fresh batteries in there. Now, what we're going to do [INDISCERNIBLE] in there. There we go. So, we have some Duracells in there. Now, I can see the batteries connect up from that battery compartment, so I don't want to pull too hard on this when I take it apart. You don't want to tug on the wires but here are our circuit boards and our circuits. These are what we're going to be manipulating. So, if I turn this on now, I can hear it, it's playing through this speaker. But now, even more importantly, I can just take my finger and my thumb and I just wet it a little bit. I'm just going to lick the tip of my thumb and just get a little bit of saliva on there and just start by just sort of looking at it and I find all these little bumps, these little bits of solder here. You can really see that these are where that circuit board makes its connections and if I have a wet finger and I touch it, as I lift my hand away, it's high-pitched, and now I'm pitch bending it. And this just tells me that this circuit will work for circuit bending. One suggestion, if you're worried about lead, you can always lick your finger once and then touch it. The other solution is you could just have a little pan of water, dip your finger in and then just start probing. But I can tell it--probably the first place to work is going to be right there. I'm pressing my thumb and it's connecting up these two blobs of solder which are normally not connected and that causes the change in pitch and the change in tone. So, that's where I'm going to start.

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