Sight And Sound Combine In This Engaging Synthesizer Sculpture

October 23, 2022 by 2 Comments

We’ll always have a soft spot for circuit sculpture projects; anything with components supported on nice tidy rows of brass wires always captures our imagination. But add to that a little bit of light and a lot of sound, and you get something like this hybrid synthesizer sculpture that really commands attention.

[Eirik Brandal] calls his creation “corwin point,” and describes it as “a generative dual voice analog synthesizer.” It’s built with a wide-open architecture that invites exploration and serves to pull the eyes — and ears — into the piece. The lowest level of the sculpture has all the “boring” digital stuff — an ESP32, the LED drivers, and the digital-to-analog converters. The next level up has the more visually interesting analog circuits, built mainly “dead-bug” style on a framework of brass wires. The user interface, mainly a series of pots and switches, lives on this level, as does a SeeedStudio WIO terminal, which is used to display a spectrum analyzer of the sounds generated.

Moving up a bit, there’s a seemingly incongruous vacuum tube overdrive along with a power amp and speaker in an acrylic enclosure. A vertical element of thick acrylic towers over all and houses the synth’s delay line, and the light pipes that snake through the sculpture pulse in time with sequencer events. The video below shows the synth in action — the music that it generates never really sounds the same twice, and sounds like nothing we’ve heard before, except perhaps briefly when we heard something like the background music from Logan’s Run.

Hats off to [Eirik] for another great-looking and great-sounding build; you may remember that his “cwymriad” caught our attention earlier this year.

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Pop Goes The Mechanical Ping Pong Sculpture

March 7, 2022 by 12 Comments

In the waiting rooms of some dentists or doctors, you might have seen a giant metal ball rolling around in a large glass case. While it sure beats looking through those magazines, the sculpture can’t have come cheap. But not all of us want to pay high-end prices for fun toys. As a more cost-effective alternative, [JBV Creative] built an awesome 3D-printed ping pong sculpture.

The basic concept is the same as those fancy sculptures: a ball goes up, moves through some sort of impressive range of motion as it makes its way back down, and some sort of drive mechanism pushes it back to repeat the cycle anew. The design of this particular art piece is no different. A ping-pong ball falls down a funnel into a queue where balls are slowly loaded via a 12-way Geneva mechanism. An Archimedes spiral cam charges an elastic band that yeets the ball up and out of the track and sends it sailing through the air and down inside the funnel mentioned earlier. Everything on this sculpture is 3D-printed aside from the rubber bands and the ping pong balls.

What’s tricky about these sorts of things is the precision required both in printing and in design. It needs to run for hundreds if not thousands of hours and make no mistake. Making something work correctly 99% of the time is hard, but that last 1% can be almost as much work as that first 99%. [JBV Creative]’s first attempt had a catapult mechanism and he printed and tried out several scoops, but none gave the trajectory that he was looking for.

[JBV Creative] tried a plunger mechanism, but without a counterbalance weight providing the power, it just didn’t have enough oomph to launch the ball. Luckily, holes were included in the design, so it was relatively easy to adapt what had already been printed to use rubber bands instead. An additional goal was to have no visible fasteners, so everything needed to be mounted from the back. Check it out in action after the break.

It’s an incredible project that took serious thought, dedication, and in [JBV Creative]’s words, plenty of CAD twirling. It’s a great lesson in iterating and experimentation. If your talents are more soldering-based rather than CAD-based, perhaps a circuit sculpture is more up your alley?

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Close up shot of a mechanical sequencer for 555 based synthesizers

Kinetic Synth-Kebab Sculpture Plays Punk Sequentially

October 4, 2021 by 12 Comments

What’s better than an Atari Punk Console synthesizer? How about four Atari Punk Console synthesizers. And what better way to present them but as brass wire art sculptures. We’d have forgiven [iSax] if he’d stopped at four brass wire synths, but he took things to another level with his kinetic sculpture that does double duty as a mechanical sequencer. Called the Cyclotone – The Mechanical Punk Console Sequencer, it features wood, brass, brushes, and 555 timers. You can see the demonstration in the video below the break.

If you’re not familiar with the Atari Punk Console, it’s a circuit first described as a “Sound Synthesizer” in Forest Mims’ “Engineer’s Notebook: Integrated Circuit Applications” first published in 1980. It utilized two 555 timers in a single chip, the 556. Later dubbed the “Atari Punk Console”, the circuit has stood the test of time and is still quite popular among hackers of all sorts.

[iSax]’s build adds a sequencing element that allows the synths to be played automatically. The synthesizers are skewered 90 degrees from each other on a square dowel, which is turned at a variable RPM by a stepper motor controlled by a knob at the base of the sculpture.

On either side of each synth is a commutator that contacts salvaged rotary tool brushes which provide power through the hexagonal brass supports. Each synth retains its own speaker and controls and has its own segmented numeral displayed with discrete LED’s that light up when each synth is played.

We applaud [iSax] for a well executed and imaginative build that successfully meshes circuit scultpure, kinetic sculpture, classic electronics and even blinkenlights. If you enjoyed this build, you should also go have a look at a free form Atari Punk Console build and another one built into a joystick. If you come across a project of any kind that catches your fancy, be sure you let us know about it via the Tip Line!

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A wall clock with exposed circuit boards

Drunk Wall Clock Uses Convoluted Circuits To Display Time

September 20, 2021 by 9 Comments

Here at Hackaday we can never get enough of odd clocks, and we’re delighted to see [Dan O’Shea]’s creation called the Wifi-Telnet-FPGA-NTSC Drunk Wall Clock. That mouthful is an accurate description of what it does: at the heart of the device is an ESP32 that uses WiFi to connect to a Raspberry Pi. It then telnets into the system, logs in, and requests the current time using the Linux date command. So far, so ordinary.

The “FPGA” part is where it gets weirder: the ESP32 is hooked up to a VGA1306 board. This is a little PCB with an FPGA that emulates an OLED display and outputs the image to a VGA connector. [Dan] could have simply hooked up a VGA display to this, but instead went for another layer of complexity by converting the VGA signal to something resembling composite video, using nothing more than three resistors. The resulting “NTSC” signal is then fed into a small TFT display that shows the time.

The clock got its “drunk” label because the process of repeatedly running the date command and parsing its output is slow and prone to hiccups, resulting in a display where the seconds advance in a somewhat unsteady manner. This fits well with the overall aesthetic of the clock, which consists of a heap of PCBs held together with cable ties and electrical tape. Mounted on a round panel of recycled wood, it makes a beautiful wall ornament for any hacker lab.

We love projects like this that accomplish a simple task in a convoluted way, and there’s no shortage of needlessly complicated clocks, whether physically drawing the time or using machine-learning data. But if you simply like your clocks with their electronics exposed, check out this free-form LED clock or this neat circuit sculpture clock.

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Circuit Art Brings Out The Lifelike Qualities Of Electricity

August 22, 2019 by 2 Comments

Functional circuit sculptures have been gaining popularity with adventuring electronic artists who dare attempt the finicky art form of balancing structure and wire routing. [Kelly Heaton’s] sculptures however are on a whole other creative level.

Not only does she use the circuits powering her works as part of their physical component, there are no controllers or firmware to be seen anywhere; everything is discrete and analog. In her own words, she tries to balance the “logical planning” of the engineering side with the “unfettered expression” of artworks. The way she does this is by giving her circuits a lifelike quality, with disorganized circuit structures and trills and chirps that mimic those of wildlife.

One of her works, “Birds at My Feeder”, builds up on another previous work, the analog “pretty bird”. On their own, each one of the birds uses a photoresistor to affect its analog-generated chirps, providing both realistic and synthetic qualities to their calls. What the full work expands on is a sizable breadboard-mounted sequencer using only discrete components, controlling how each of the connected birds sing in a pleasing chorus. Additionally, the messy nature of the wires gives off the impression of the sequencer doubling as the birds’ nest.

There are other works as well in this project, such as the “Moth Electrolier”, in which she takes great care to keep structural integrity in mind in the design of the flexible board used there. Suffice to say, her work is nothing short of brilliant engineering and artistic prowess, and you can check one more example of it after the break. However, if you’re looking for something more methodical and clean, you can check out the entries on the circuit sculpture contest we ran last year.

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One More Weekend To Sculpt Your Circuits!

January 5, 2019 by 4 Comments

Drop what you’re doing and get thee to thy workshop. This is the last weekend of the Hackaday Circuit Sculpture Contest, the perfect chance for you to exercise the creative hacker within by building something artistic using stuff you already have on hand.

The concept is simple: build a sculpture where the electronic circuit is the sculpture. Wire the components up in a way that shows off that wiring, and uses it as the structure of the art piece. Seven top finishers will win prizes, but really we want to see everyone give this a try because the results are so cool! Need proof? Check out all the entries, then ooh and ah over a few we’ve picked out below. You have until this Tuesday at noon Pacific time to get in the game.

wirez80 by Matseng
555 Spider by Sunny
Freeform RGB Atari Punk Console by Emily Valesco

These are just three awesome examples of the different styles we’ve seen so far in the contest. Who needs a circuit board for a retro computer? Most people… but apparently not [Matseng] as this Z80 computer is freformed yet still interactive.

Really there can’t be many things more horrifying than the thought of spider robots, but somehow [Sunny] has taken away all of our fears. The 555 spider project takes “dead bug” to a whole new level. We love the angles in the legs, and the four SMD LEDs as spider eyes really finish the look of the tiny beast.

Finally, the 3D design of [Emily Valesco’s] RGB Atari Punk Console is spectacular. It’s a build that sounds great, and looks as though it will hold up to regular use. But visually, this earns a place on your desk long after the punky appeal wears off. We also like it that she added a color-coded photograph to match up the structure to the schematic, very cool!

What are you waiting for, whether it’s a mess of wires or a carefully structured electron ballet, we want to see your Circuit Sculpture!

Wonderful Sculptural Circuits Hide Interactive Synthesizers

November 29, 2018 by 14 Comments

When it rains, it pours (wonderful electronic sculpture!). The last time we posted about freeform circuit sculptures there were a few eye-catching comments mentioning other fine examples of the craft. One such artist is [Eirik Brandal], who has a large selection of electronic sculptures. Frankly, we’re in love.

A common theme of [Eirik]’s work is that each piece is a functional synthesizer or a component piece of a larger one. For instance, when installed the ihscale series uses PIR sensors to react together to motion in different quadrants of a room. And the es #17 – #19 pieces use ESP8266’s to feed the output of their individual signal generators into each other to generate one connected sound.

Even when a single sculpture is part of a series there is still striking variety in [Eirik]’s work. Some pieces are neat and rectilinear and obviously functional, while others almost looks like a jumble of components. Whatever the style we’ve really enjoyed pouring through the pages of [Eirik]’s portfolio. Most pieces have demo videos, so give them a listen!

If you missed the last set of sculptural circuits we covered this month, head on over and take a look at the flywire circuits of Mohit Bhoite.

Thanks [james] for the tip!