Experiments with the 555 IC

The 555 chip is a versatile oscillator with lots of practical applications for circuit benders.  A lot of good information can be found on them that specifically pertains to benders.  My idea in this (ultimately failed) project was to find a way to use 555s as glitch triggers.  I had a Casio with pretty good glitch capacity, so I hooked up photoresistors with a range of maybe 300K-1M Ohm between the glitch points.  I then breadboarded a couple of 555s to light up LEDs.  LEDs were taped to photoresistors, and the setup was complete.  Unfortunately, my next good idea destroyed the keyboard - injecting the 555's output signal directly onto the circuit board, which fried it surprisingly quickly.  
             The glitch trigger setup, however, worked very well.  I think it's simple enough and versatile enough for lots of people to be using it, but I haven't seen any projects like this.  The best analogy I can give for how it worked was like scrolling through glitches - I put a pot on the frequency control of the 555, so it could go anywhere from 1 pulse/second to 500 or so per second.  I would usually run it at 20 or so, listen to the tiny glitch snippets I heard, and then disable the photresistor with a switch to listen to the specific glitch I had heard.  The other really great thing is that the instrument would essentially play itself - if I wanted to reset it, I just had to wait until it scrolled through enough dead glitches, then it would come back to life on its own.  

No sound samples or pictures because I destroyed the keyboard.  I am definitely going to implement this in the next thing I build with good glitch capacity.