Circuit Bending Workshop Part Four: Fun With A Speak And Math
In part four of our Circuit Bending Workshop series, Chris has a problem with his Speak and Math. One of the more classic and potentially difficult circuit bending pieces, the Speak and Math can have often times up to 30 or more bends in it.
In the following video, Chris points out what he has found out about the Speak and Math. As always, the techniques and tools he applies here will prove useful in other projects down the road.
BILL HOLLAND: Well, that's the sound of a microcomputer dying, I think, right? I'm Bill.
CHRIS: [INAUDIBLE] I would say.
BILL HOLLAND: Hey everybody. This is Gearwire.Com, and I'm Bill Holland, and here with our latest segment from the circuit bending workshop at Northeastern University. I'm here with Dan and Christian, and we're looking at -- Is this a Speak-N-Spell? But you said it was something else, right?
CHRIS: It's a Speak-N-Math. I'll hold it up so our audience can see. Real old toy, I think it's circa like 1982 or '83, real popular with any person's childhood. Now, I'm guess we're bringing it back with circuit bending features. You know that now expands, I guess, the age line. What I' m trying to do here is just find as many bends as I possibly can, make sure they're all compatible with each other, so every time I find something I wired in, I double check with what I have and just work, you know, kind of backwards I guess just to know that everything is working with each other. You know, it kind of slows down the process but at the same time you're guaranteed a good toy to work if you have to go back in later. I've done these bends a long, long time ago, you know, spend a lot of time with it, just put it way, and you know I just opened it back up now and continued to go to work on it.
BILL HOLLAND: Cool. And I may have heard that with these -- with the Speak-N-Spells and Speak-N-Maths you can have to up to like 20 or more points depending on how adventurous you are with it.
CHRIS: Yeah. I mean, you know, depending on your skill level as well, you can do any Google search and people tend to be real fashionable. Besides the bends, you know, painting the outside, getting various colors, and I've seen some of them that have like felt on it, like fur and all kinds of weird [EXPLETIVE], you know? I kind of like just the quality of just having something unpainted. I have two Speak-N-Reads at home and I decided that on one of them I'll be adventurous and color it up and then one of them, of course, I'll leave. I'm not really sure what I'm going to do here. I originally just wanted to have a bunch of toggle switches on it but I basically want to have as much variance as possible so, you know, slowly but surely hopefully. What's also nice about these is there's a good amount of space for small components, so little mini toggle switches right here and a lot of the potentiometers that you can order online are actually a fairly small profile as well, so they fit in there real good. Some of the older ones here [INAUDIBLE] size difference dramatic which can really make some thing easy or difficult.
BILL HOLLAND: Sounds good. Well, thanks for showing that to us, and check out some of the other tips we did before at Gearwire.Com that are from the circuit bending workshop at Northeastern University, and again I'm here with Chris and Dan and thanks for watching. This is Gearwire.Com.
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