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ART&TECH_02 : RECAP part 1

Group Project

I hate group work. It makes me anxious, and I get very tense about it. Luckily, I was grouped with Ben (who is a ray of sunshine) and Christina (who humors my less than enthusiastic spirit). Our goal was to create a cohesive sound apparatus through pars we each brought to the table in the form of electronic toys for tots. Then create a housing for it using the Rhino software. This project was all of my technological nightmares just wrapped together.

Our toys were :

1. an Elmo phone
2. a battery operated drum
3. a battery operated guitar

Day one
Was breaking down the toys. We took the electronic parts and power sources from their plastic casing using brute force, screw drivers and hand saws. Once the parts were gutted we looked at what we had to deal with

• resistors
• printed circuit boards
• transistors
  
• speakers
• batteries
• potentiometer

The guitar was eventually abandoned because it was a little to programed for us to break down. The sounds were too "auto-tune" and drowned out the Elmo phone and the drum kit and we wanted a little more "play" space with simple sounds rather than "pre-fab." tunes. So Ben provided us with a piano toy which made significantly simpler sounds. Which gave us some wiggle room with circuit bending.

MUCH to my surprise, circuit bending, soldering, and experimenting was actually enjoyable.

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oh blogger, my nemesis... i put you on the back burner. updates coming (VERY) soon!