It’s no secret that we really like circuit sculptures around here, and we never tire of seeing what creative ways people come up with to celebrate the components used to make a project, rather than locking them away in an enclosure. And a circuit sculpture that incorporates sound and light in its design is always a real treat to discover.
Called “cwymriad” by its designer, [Eirik Brandal], this sound sculpture incorporates all kinds of beautiful elements. The framework is made from thick pieces of acrylic, set at interesting angles to each other and in contrasting colors. The sound-generating circuit, which uses square wave outputs from an ESP32 to provide carrier and modulation signals for a dual ring modulator, is built on a framework of tinned wires. The sounds the sculpture makes have a lovely resonance to them, like random bells and chimes that fade and mix together. There’s also a matrix of white LEDs that form a sort of digital oscilloscope that displays shifting waveforms in time with the music.
While we like the way this looks and sounds, the real bonus here is the details of construction in the video below. [Eirik]’s careful craftsmanship working with multiple materials is evident throughout; we were especially impressed by the work needed to drill holes for the LED matrix, any one of which slightly out of place would have been painfully obvious in the finished product.
This is far from [Eirik]’s first appearance on these pages. His vacuum tube and silicon “ioalieia” was featured just a few weeks back, and “ddrysfeöd” used the acrylic parts as light pipes in a lovely way.
When I saw the “oscilloscope” I was expecting an LM3914/CD4017 based Forrest Mims design. Seems like you could dispense with the ESP32 if you fed pseudorandom data to a pair of TLC7524 DACs controlling simple VCOs.
Anyhow, respect to the soldering job and the fortitude to tediously/permanently solder something as dodgy as a PT3299.
It looks very interesting.
After seeing the block diagram I was very keen to see how the analogue magic was done.
Unfortunately there is no Schematic so we’re left with –
It looks very interesting.
This wins in both domains – as an electronic instrument and as circuit sculpture.