Octatone's Bends: Wiggles Toy Accordion

The Wiggles toy accordion actually makes use of accordion-like movement to trigger sounds. Pulling and pushing the accordion in and out pulls a string that is attached to a sprocket that bumps against a switch as it winds and unwinds. So this ends up being a very hands intensive bend.



This side of the accordion houses the main board as well as the sprocket that triggers the accordion sounds. Modifications seen here are pitch bend body contacts and pitch bend photoresistor on momentary push toggles.



On this side you can see the photoresitors that are activated by the push toggles on the opposite side of the accordion as well as three toggles for max pitch up, max pitch down, and a distortion + pitch down bend.



Inside the photoresistor side.



Top side of the main board. The three bends on the photo resistor only work with resistance in the path to the common point. Hence the sloppy add-on resistor pictured above.


Bend points:



Yellow is the common point. Red circles are distortion, pitch up, and pitch down + random note toggle - there must be resistance of about 5k between these points and common for them to work. Blue are body contact pitch bend points.

Octatone's Bends: Vtech Talking Whiz Kid Plus Documented

The Vtech Talking Whiz Kid Plus is a fairly stable benders playground. there are more than a dozen bends that will yield similar results of the toy crashing and spewing out random bits and pieces of words. The tough part is finding bends that do not sound too much the same.

From the top of the piece, you can see I paid a paltry $1.99. The toggles trigger bends from left to right as follows: random spew A, rhythmic loop slow, rhythmic loop medium, rhythmic loop fast, "tremolo" warble slow, "tremolo" warble fast, sample freeze, random spew B.



From inside, you can see the cavernous amount of unused space where the main board resides. There is more than enough room for 20 or more toggle switches if one so dared.





To get to the main board you must detach the keyboard by either unscrewing the connection between to the main logic board and keyboard, or breaking off the excess plastic holding the keyboard in place (the three red dots in the lower area of the above photo).



Now for the bend points:

Random spew A: brown with white stripe to red with white stripe
Rhythmic loop slow: pink to light green with white stripe
Rhythmic loop medium: red to light green with white stripe
Rhythmic loop fast: green to light green with white stripe
"Tremolo" warble slow: pink to gray with black stripe
"Tremolo" warble fast: yellow to red
Sample freeze: yellow to pink with black sripe
Random spew B: blue with white stripe to red with white stripe

From the Community: Circuit Bendind @ Madison Pop Fest '07

Features Alex from GetLoFi showing how to use a 555 IC to replace crystal CPU clocks.