These are my first two attempts at repackaging toys, both from over a year ago. I've gotten a little better at it (see the previous post on PINK BOX), but I really like the messy, science fair project-gone-wrong feel these things have to them. This one in the grey box was also my first experiment with building my own controllers - I tore open a calculator, traced lines on the circuit board myself to find pin connections, and used the buttons to control various functions on a toy guitar (notes, pitch, distortion, etc) that I found while bending it. An interesting result was that different button combinations would create very different levels of resistance, and would be completely different than pressing the buttons independently. Another interesting effect of this is that the calculator interface would allow certain buttons to be activated only when other ones were pressed down -- which I never really analyzed, making for a chaotic and interesting interface.
EDIT: Sound link for this thing now available:
http://www.hotlinkfiles.com/files/416921_vlwf3/superbox.mp3
This second project was built into a small dumpstered typewriter case, and was an experiment to indulge my fetishization of patch bays, and using circuit bent voltage signals to process other toys. It's made from the insides of 4 independent toys - an Elmo toy, a "bomb box" that made explosion sounds, a telephone toy, and a steering wheel toy. The patch bay allows you to interconnect their signals, and wasn't a total success. I really wanted to have the audio output of different toys be the control voltage to modulate each other's pitches, in some sort of weird feedback loop that I could patch between. Unfortunately, an audio signal doesn't do the job very well -- if I were to rebuild this today, I would use LED/photoresistor (also known as vactrol) combos to patch between instead of just straight electricity, but I'm not going to go back and fix it now.
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