Built by Mike Walters, 2003
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The Groovy Defibrillator was commissioned by Geoff Reacher as a wedding gift for his brother. He wanted to give him a random "what the fuck is this?" kind of present, so he asked me to build him a sound gizmo. I found the perfect case for it too. It's from a circa '70s battery operated air freshener. It's still kind of smells like it. The fan vent is now a speaker vent.
The innards come from 3 different things. The circuit
is one of those heart beat simulators for baby's cribs. It starts off with
a basic "whoosh-whoosh".
The pitch/speed can be controlled by pressing 3 different screw heads (body
contacts) pressure sensitive. Best results when you lick your fingers. I
added a button on the device, that once pressed, makes the whoosh go into
a hyper spazz glitch heart attack mode. Sounds like explosions.
That circuit then triggers glitches and sounds from
a circuit I got out of a little talking crib toy. But the sounds are wired
to be real fast, so it's
not too discernable. They sound more robotic and react to the sounds from
the heartbeat circuit and mix
to the same speaker. The final circuit is from an old plaster of paris christmas
picture. When switched on, the windows in the church (six LED's) would
light up. I wired the circuit to the speaker, so simply put, they flash to
the sounds. Only 4 of these LED's are brought to the surface. The other
2 LED's are hidden inside the device, connected to photo resistors on another
other circuit. Their job
is to modulate the speed of the crib toy circuit. So the louder this thing
gets, the more 'warbly' the crib toy.
The second LED-photo resistor (optocoupler) is button activated, and it makes
the crib toy's speed ultra
low and warbly.
The third button is a reset button. This is to defibrillate
the heart back to normal. In addition to the 3 body contacts and 3 switches,
there's a
1/4" mono output