Thingamawha? Thingamagoop2!

ard

Introducing the Thingamagoop2! Remember that awkward looking box with two LEDacles sticking out and a bunch of strange buttons and knobs that with some circuit bending synthesized different sounds that kept your neighbor up for hours on end? Well now its back! Smaller and one less LEDacle, but jam-packed with more features – like our personal favorite: the ability to program it via Arduino. Check out a video of the ‘music’ after the break.

Comments [36]

tagged: 2, ledacle, thingamagoop, thingamakit

Reader Comments

I’m not a huge fan of random noise myself. It seems like it wouldn’t be that hard to at least organize the sounds into a melody or something. I even enjoy electronic music and chiptunes, so it’s not like I just dislike the entire sound.
—end circuit bending whine —

Posted at 3:33 pm on Nov 12th, 2009 by Caleb Kraft

Wow, I want one…

Posted at 3:34 pm on Nov 12th, 2009 by BBX

arduino post.

*sigh*

Posted at 3:34 pm on Nov 12th, 2009 by bobob

It’s circuit bending with an arduino! Yay!

I’m not one to complain but are you trying to flip the bird to the complaining users?

Posted at 3:43 pm on Nov 12th, 2009 by Hackius

I’m into turntablism, so, I am quite used to hearing messed up sounds but this video is far from enjoyable to me.

Posted at 4:45 pm on Nov 12th, 2009 by babble

The Arduino doesn’t have a chip installed…I guess it’s just a fancy USB-serial adapter now?

Posted at 5:08 pm on Nov 12th, 2009 by CalcProgrammer1

somewhere, in some distant landfill, a see-n-say is rolling over in it’s shallow grave, vomiting up the words ” you bleeplabs.com”

honestly though, how can anyone take circuit bending seriously, granted there are a few good examples, but they are put forth by people with actual musical talent. but this being considered music is truly sad, more so than this post.

Posted at 5:20 pm on Nov 12th, 2009 by aztraph

Looks like a NoDuino to me

Posted at 5:23 pm on Nov 12th, 2009 by hrpuffnstuff

Is it just me, or does that thing look like the giant robot enemy from Monsters vs. Aliens?

Just a side note, the URL arduinoaday.com is available.

Posted at 5:43 pm on Nov 12th, 2009 by Dane

they are just showing off it’s CV capabilities (google control voltage).

it’s not really circuit bending either.

most hackaday commenters seem pissed off for the wrong reasons.

Posted at 5:46 pm on Nov 12th, 2009 by d

also, i find it strange that the only parts of the arduino hooked to wires (as shown) are reset and rx/tx pins.

Posted at 5:48 pm on Nov 12th, 2009 by d

looks like they are just using the arduino as a fancy FTDI cable

Posted at 5:56 pm on Nov 12th, 2009 by RazorConcepts

Is there really a market for things that sound like this?

Posted at 6:20 pm on Nov 12th, 2009 by jAMES

wow that advertisement: Mmmorpg dating site; that pic is scarry as heck.

Posted at 6:41 pm on Nov 12th, 2009 by Dan K

Weird, that is the reset pin. The reset pin toggles the state of the reset pin on the CPU, but that is missing. The Atmel AVR chips reset when RESET is tied to ground, so the reset line shouldn’t be grounded normally. The other two are TX and RX (which tie the AVR to the FTDI chip as well) so all they’re missing is ground which looks like it’s tied to Reset for some reason (ground is 4 pins over from Reset on the front connector). I guess the software on the PC is setting the appropriate FTDI line that pulls Reset to ground.

Posted at 8:20 pm on Nov 12th, 2009 by CalcProgrammer1

a circuit bender to musician is like a pedophile to child, and its like necrophilia to EE

Posted at 10:22 pm on Nov 12th, 2009 by therian

OMG! That is amazing. Won it)

Posted at 1:58 am on Nov 13th, 2009 by elena865

I’ll say what I said about the first Thingamadogshit. It’s a complete waste of time, energy, resources and everything imaginable. What a piece of shit.

Posted at 2:05 am on Nov 13th, 2009 by Entropia

You don’t have to be a musician to invent an instrument.
The sound you hear is not what is demonstrated here…
People are so quick to judge and criticize.

Posted at 2:54 am on Nov 13th, 2009 by NNM

There is no, ‘circuit bending’ going on here. The smiley faced noisebox is outputting a CV (an analog control signal) which is being controlled by it’s LDR+LED phototheramin style interface. This control voltage is being fed into the Moog synthesizer to externally control the pitch of it’s oscillators (which would normally be controlled via a scaled control voltage generated by it’s keyboard that corresponds to the chromatic scale).

There are no gate (0 to +5v pulsed note on/off) signals being generated by the box so you are not getting individual ‘notes’ per se. just one continuously varying pitch modulated by the inputted control voltage (which IIRC, as per Dr. Moog’s standard should vary from about 0 to +10v, 1v for every octave above the bottom one on a standard 88 key keyboard). The box’s CV could also be used to control other parameters on another instrument (filter cutoff etc.).

The end result sounds like shit- (subjective I guess), but hey, no ‘circuit bending’ going on here.

Posted at 2:55 am on Nov 13th, 2009 by lurker

bobob direct and honest, right in the face, I like this character

Posted at 3:25 am on Nov 13th, 2009 by therian

little bobob has lost its knob, and cannot find it anymore, Duude! wtf, be a bit more constructive….

Even though i have to agree that it’s a pity that there’s a lot of arduino stuff on this site and not so many other microcontroller ‘hacks’.

Nice box, shame for the electronics inside, have to agree with lurker

Posted at 4:58 am on Nov 13th, 2009 by nobob!no!

If any of the “negativists” had taken a modern music history course, they might not find the sounds of the Thingamagoop that out of place. If Busoni could have had one of these when he wrote the “New Aesthetic of Music”, he would have been psyched (1907)!

Listen to the old stuff, before you say you listen to a lot of “new”,”weird” stuff. Try some Stockhausen, or Varèse, Cage, Cowell, Partch, Ussachevsky, etc. Mario Davidovsky’s ‘Synchronisms’ being a set of personal favorites.

Trolls: 1 Me: 0 (’cause you got my hackles up)

Posted at 6:40 am on Nov 13th, 2009 by MePipes

@MePipes
there is good noise Apex Twin for example but circuit bending is crap nothing more

Posted at 7:27 am on Nov 13th, 2009 by therian

what a bunch of cranky pills.
circuit-bending is fun and a great way to introduce people to electronics.

Posted at 7:41 am on Nov 13th, 2009 by angrydroid

I kinda feel bad categorizing the video as ’shit’, it just seems like a few guys wanking around and playing with the cv output of the box, not a master work that I’d be comfortable showing off to the world. Nothing wrong with that, but as third parties to the video I’m not sure that the rest of us will get the enjoyment that the creators got out of the experience.

@angrydroid

I don’t think that any of us have a problem with that (I don’t at least), circuit bending is great when it is used as baby steps toward something bigger or just viewed as brainless mucking around. People get mad when circuit bending is used to turn electronics into some kind of dogmatic, artsy enterprise that unlocks “parallel worlds that weren’t meant to be accessed” like the wikipedia article tries to spin it.

Posted at 8:08 am on Nov 13th, 2009 by lurker

The device itself really isn’t interesting at all. I am, however, interested in their use of the Arduino board solely for its FTDI chip. I’ll have to remember that trick the next time I need to get debugging information out of one of my projects.

Posted at 9:12 am on Nov 13th, 2009 by rd

Good Lord you people complain a lot.

Posted at 9:28 am on Nov 13th, 2009 by jeff-o

Can everybody please stop bitching about arduino’s, it is very old. Just call it post-anti-arduinoism. It’s the new thing!

Posted at 10:13 am on Nov 13th, 2009 by Godi

That schematic seems odd… The switch above the lower-left op-amp and darlington appears to switch between two caps of the same value. Wtf? And the emitter of the bottom-center darlington isn’t connected to anything. How is does it bias? Strange…

Posted at 1:13 pm on Nov 13th, 2009 by Hitek146

^”How does it bias”… :D

Posted at 1:16 pm on Nov 13th, 2009 by Hitek146

I want to like Circuit bending… I really do, the concept of hacking an instrument to produce new and unique sounds is so damn appealing and inspiring….

Unfortunately 99.9% of the time the end result fails HARD and ends up just being annoying sounds.

I’d really love to see someone who circuit bends and gets some worth-listening-to music out the other end… surely SOMEONE out there falls into this category.

Posted at 2:42 pm on Nov 13th, 2009 by twistedsymphony

deconstruction will allow a construction of a future aspect on our relationship to sounds created by electronic devices. The circuit bending movement is giving birth to a new interest amongst young people to build their own synthesizers.

Posted at 10:19 am on Nov 14th, 2009 by rob

The new one looks dope. The arduino connectivity is just what I wanted.

I recorded an entire EP of rap/noise tracks using one of the original thingamagoops, running through a Sampletrak st-224’s effects processor.

It is called VOLKSWAGON, Click my name to download it. It sucks pretty bad.

Posted at 6:13 am on Nov 16th, 2009 by v1rus

LOL @ all everyone hating circuit bending as hard as they can.

We should illegalize Arduinos, so electrical engineers won’t have to deal with the sort of musician riff raff that creates these illogical random sounds that probably aren’t music because they arent generated by a guitar.

Posted at 6:44 am on Nov 16th, 2009 by v1rus

oh no! the nerds are mad!

Posted at 10:40 am on Nov 16th, 2009 by gob bluth

Thingamawha? Thingamagoop2!

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