My first run of boards came in this week. I am pleased to report that the circuit works as intended (sings an analog electronic song). I’ll post video of that soon, but for now, some photos of the pretty board. I used gold-plated copper and solder mask to achieve a watermark effect, as you can see in some of these pictures. These boards (along with components to solder) will be given to attendees at Creative Capital’s 2019 retreat in June.
electricity
Pretty bird process /
Various images from the process to design a pretty bird printed circuit board for manufacture. April, 2019
Pretty bird PCB /
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 /
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 /
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).
Spring peeper oscillator /
Oscillator aka astable multivibrator circuit laid out in the form of a spring peeper.
Moth bus /
I've been making moth trails in the form of animated light. To learn more, please follow the links below.
https://hackaday.io/…/163201-electronic…/log/161522-moth-bus
birds and electricity /
Detail of new work in progress concerning birds and electricity, 2019