Atari Punk Circuit

The Atari Punk Circuit was designed as a beginners' project by the venerable Forrest Mims, III. I built it as a prototype of a much grander project still to come, once I get around to making those flex resistor circuits for it. The Atari Punk circuit uses 2 555 integrated circuits (or 1 556), which is a timer circuit, and slaps resistors downstream of the inputs to vary the rate at which it pulses and capacitors on the outputs to modulate that pulse into a continuous and audible waveform. In this iteration I used 2 10K Ohm linear potentiometers as resistors. The 1st one modulates the frequency of the output wave, thus changing pitch; while the 2nd one is bridged across 2 input pins to provide destructive interference and noise upon the 1st wave, thus making buzzy distortion.

Shortly after running it in the video above, I connected this circuit to a power supply without checking what it was set to first, and promptly burnt one of the 555s out. Smoke and everything. Luckily, I have a replacement and will be putting it back together once I've wired up some flex bars in the place of the current linear potentiometers, even though linear potentiometers are dead sexy.

I have no idea how this relates to molecular biology. Yet.

Electricity

A recent All Hands Active (the hackerspace) clean-up/reorganization night. That wall to my right is entirely covered in whiteboard, and it is awesome.

Every once in a while it's a good idea to be reminded that electricity, while awesome and good, can also be very painful. Turns out that the lamp in my left hand there had frayed and exposed wires wires up top, so when I plugged it in with the other hand it gave me a nice shock. This is not at all the first time I have been electrically shocked and it was by no means the worst, but it's still a good reminder that voltage is not just an abstract number.

I have been shocked with 120V many times. The worst was when I was in a music supply store testing out a nice little used Fender tube amp. It had nice tone, but the 2 10" speakers at 250W just didn't provide the grumble that I wanted (I later got a 400W 1 15" speaker with tweeter amp to satisfy this, which later was stolen from me and I do often miss it because that thing could roar). So I reached to the back of the unfamiliar amp to turn it off, and promptly found that the exposed vacuum tubes had been engineered right next to the on/off switch and, lucky me!, they were loose and kindly delivered a searing shock that knocked me flat on my ass and out of breath. Unfortunately, so far as I am able to discern, this did not result in the development of any superpowers. Maybe I need more volts?

Voltage!!!