Circuit bender Christopher Kaczmarek will have a variety of circuit-bent and electronic musical instruments on hand at World Maker Faire later on this month. Visitors will be invited to rock out on the instruments.
Scratch Box, pictured above, is an example of Chris’s work:
A gutted credit card reader is repurposed to become another instrument for the Alpha-Bit arsenal. All the circuitry has been removed except for the magnetic stripe reader; in its place an amplifier and a speaker have been housed in the enclosure. Slide your credit card (or any card with a magnetic stripe) and hear the data information translated onto audio. Producing sounds similar to a scratching record player, the scratch box is a fun and expressive instrument. A 1/4″ output is included (as always) so that the fun can be made even louder when plugged into an amplifier.
Chris will be plugging all of his instruments into a mixer, which will also output some cool analog effects. Finally, he will have a simple square wave circuit breadboarded up to show people the basic “guts” of the instruments.
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