Tuesday, October 16, 2007

WP-20 sound effects synthesizer



I have been building some noisemakers using cardboard as pcb. It´s a nice material for building electronic projects at home because: 1. everybody may not have the needed equipment to make "real" pcb:s 2. every one has a piece of cardboard laying around. 3. It is cheap and easy. This is my latest creation on cardboard pcb. It´s wp-20 sound effects synth. It was very nice to do on cardboard because there was enough spce between components in the original pcb design.

I did´t use the original noise source with 18v but i built a simple 9v noise generator. I left q1, r1, c3 unconnected to the board. here is the noise circuit.
output of the noise generator was connected to r3 through 50k resistor.

Testing wp-20 video:
link to music from outer space wp-20 page:




I made a sub oscillator for my wp-20. It is based on cd4040 ripple counter it uses the vco squarewave (before the 100k resistor marked R8 in the original wp20 schematics) as clock input and divides it. Six switches (from 1 octave down to 6 octave down) select the harmonics to vcf-vca. The circuit is quite simple the component values may be tweaked to get better performance. I used components that I happened to have so some different values might work better but these seem to work ok. (sub osc out is connected to ic 2b pin 6 through a 100k resistor like the vco) here is a picture of the circuit