Pretty bird process / April 30, 2019 by kelly heaton

Various images from the process to design a pretty bird printed circuit board for manufacture. April, 2019

Pretty bird PCB / April 25, 2019 by kelly heaton

2019 circuit board designed in KiCad (colors correspond to KiCad layers - not my choosing, but interesting op art effect). The circuit sings a simple “pretty bird” song as demonstrated in the following video…

Electronic naturalism and collective intelligence / April 23, 2019 by kelly heaton

Detail from recent experiments in 3d. Collective intelligence, AI, and Elon Musk have been on my mind lately. This image was made possible by a wealth of information and tools that are free for anyone with an Internet connection, notably Blender, Andrew Price aka “Blender Guru” videos on YouTube, and models available under the Creative Commons license (butterfly by Kirin Karpenko and LEDs by Sonny See, both available on Blendswap). Although not free, Julius Harling’s incredible Graswald also deserves mention. #creativecommonslicense

life-like bird song circuit / April 19, 2019 by kelly heaton

This simple circuit sings like a bird, even with chirp variation! This effect is caused by various discrete non-linear components in a breadboard. I tried to build a soldered version and, while it sings, I haven’t been able to reproduce the life-like quality of this circuit (hence my theory that parasitic capacitance is at play).

In the front half of the breadboard, you see three astable multivibrators that create an irregular tempo. These are connected back to various locations in a “chirp generator” circuit (based on the classic doorbell canary design with an audio transformer).