We’re all familiar with record-your-own-message greeting cards. Generally they’re little more than a cute gimmick for a friend’s birthday, but [dögenigt] saw that these cards had more potential.
After sourcing a couple of cheap modules from eBay, the first order of business was to replace the watch batteries with a DC power supply. Following the art of circuit bending, he then set about probing contacts on the board. Looking to control the pitch of the recorded message, [dögenigt] found two pads that when touched, changed the speed of playback. Wiring these two points to the ears of a potentiometer allowed the pitch to be varied continously. Not yet satisfied, [dögenigt] wanted to enable looped playback, and found a pin that went low when the message was finished playing. Wiring this back to the play button allowed the recording to loop continuously.
[dögenigt] now has a neat little sampler on his hands for less than $10 in parts. To top it off, he housed it all in a sweet 70s intercom enclosure, using the Call button to activate recording, and even made it light sensitive with an LDR.
We’ve seen a few interesting circuit bends over the years – check out this digitally bent Roland TR-626 or this classic hacked Furby.
Check out the video under the break.
Put a bunch of them together and control with MIDI for a multi-channel sampling thing.
I like the way you think. If you build it, make sure you drop it into the tip line :)
R2D2 wishes you BEEP Boop XMAS
It’s amazing what commercialization has brought us. next up, a “video greeting card” complete with a cheap and flexible screen.
Then dögenigt could display the audio waveform too! Come to think of it, we could use a card that records a video message too. Lot’s of hacks there.
Couple of years ago I read something about moving video ads embedded in special (plastic?) pages inserted into high-end glossies. IIRC it was quite expensive so that’s probably why it hasn’t made more inroads.
Video greetings ‘cards’ exist, I’ve seen them used as part of a large/high-value product (gift card for a ~£1k item). Not completely thin though.
I am going to build my own greetings cards next year, I wish I had thought about it this year