Alphabet Pal Mod

February 7, 2012

Overview

A circuit bent children's toy for experimental sound making. It can also be recorded and sampled to produce lo-fi music.

Time Invested: 2 days
Cost: $30
Features:

• 2 pitch/rate controls (coarse and fine)
• 1/4-inch mono output

Video

Details

I first had the idea for this project while I was in high school. My baby cousin got an Alphabet Pal for his birthday, and I was charged with liberating the toy from its packaging and loading it with batteries. Once I powered it up, I recognized the toy's true potential: a drum machine. The Alphabet Pal has a "letter sounds" function which, as the name implies, makes the sound of a letter in the alphabet corresponding to the button pressed. Perfect for making some beats. The following week I went out and bought my own Alphabet Pal, replaced the speaker with an audio output jack, plugged it into my guitar amp, and jammed.

When circuit bending started to take off later that year, I knew the Alphabet Pal needed to be dissected once again. Sadly my experience with electronics was limited at that time, and the idea of reverse engineering a complex design was too daunting. I shelved the project and simply used the toy as a beat box for the next few years. Then in early 2012, I discovered this video buried in the depths of YouTube.

Not be outdone by a random guy on the internet who had the same idea as me, I disassembled the toy and tested various components to deduce their function. The project was still a little overwhelming considering my electrical engineering degree has taught me virtually nothing about electronics design thus far, but Google and reddit had my back. After a few hours banging my head against the wall, I was able to pinpoint the circuit responsible for playback rate control. I swapped the resistors which controlled the rate for a couple of potentiometers to be used for coarse and fine tuning. After testing, I added some knobs and put it all back together. The result: A truly horrifying musical caterpillar.

Gallery

License: CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed - You may copy, adapt, and use this work for any purpose, even commercial, but only if derivative works are distributed under the same license.

Category: Hardware