ROB WARMOWSKI: You know if you’re like me, there have been situations where you’ve been at a club, or on site, or doing a performance where you wish that you had the ability to re-matrix or to re-arrange the way your signal path is actually moving through a mixer, or moving through a piece of equipment. And one of the ways that you can actually build something like, build a signal path that sums signal in a way that you would like it to be summed instead of the way the manufacturer wants it to be done is you can actually get parts and build the signal path out of these parts. And here is a good example of a way to start. This is a plate that has four RCA jacks in it. So you would connect RCA cables to these, to these connectors here. As you can see it’s free-floating. So, and on the back here the actual signals are traveling along the, traveling along the conductors as you can see here. And you can jump -- you could actually take a solder or wire and, you know, add this input to this input, literally sum them together right here at the, at the actual panel. So there’s something to consider and again for ¢75, can’t go wrong.

You know sometimes just the size of the object that you find on the shelf here at American Science will inspire you to, conceive of a new project using , using the object that you found. Here what we found a whole box full of electret microphone capsules for ¢50 a piece. So these are microphones, okay? Tiny, tiny little microphones with a hot and a ground connector on them and then some sort of proprietary plastic clip. Chances are more than likely, especially at 50 cents a piece you would just clip this, you would, you know, just clip the wire right off and then run this microphone into a load that it would be able to actually drive. And the idea being I think that at 50 cents a piece, buy a whole handful of these and let’s say, oh, I don’t know, make a body suit filled with microphones. You could literally like put them all over, all over a vest or something like this and then run -- make, you know, ensure that you’ve got signal coming out of all these, amplify that signal somehow, get those signals into a digital audio workstation and take readings, all your readings of certain body motions.

Another good example would be to take these microphones and put them in a, unexpected places as part of a domestic spying program. We’re not going to get into that too deeply. But at 50 cents a pop, the limit is really your imagination and how many quarters you got in your pocket. Electret microphones.