For a few years now I’ve been using video bending as a way to learn more electronics. It wasn’t too long ago I thought a fun project would be to really experiment with audio reactivity on a “Mutant Enhancer”. I got some BJTs and built one of those dirty “Enhancer” circuits on a breadboard and got to twiddlin’ and turnin’ knobs.
First I built a dirty 2 band envelope follower to feed the BJTs, then I bent that Enhancer all up looking for some cool effects and was really happy with what I had.
With all the connections between the envelope follower and the bent archer board I was really struggling with getting a semi-permanent prototype (I could bring to shows). So I decided now was a good time to learn PCB manufacturing. (Jesus christ was that bad timing with the tariffs on China.)
After trouble shooting my way through a poorly designed PCB, hand soldering 603 surface mount parts out of cheapness and blowing up an SMD Op-Amp because I installed it upside down. I got my second prototype up and running and to my surprise. All my bends are having the exact same problems as the previous iteration. Sick!
They are all behaving completely differently than the breadboard prototype!
I checked my old breadboard prototype many times over and my schematic matches perfectly. Surely I can’t be that wrong so consistently?!
So I guess my question is, would there really be that much of a difference between the bread board and the PCB? Are the electromagnetic forces acting between the rails of the breadboard playing that much of a roll?
The only thing that works as it did is the “Blur”. Just a capacitor to ground on the input.
I also noticed the PCB enhancer is a lot more… enhancey… The sharpness and brightness come up a lot at the loss of a little contrast. Also some weird looking warping that kind of reminds me of video aliasing. I was at least smart enough to throw in a bypass switch.
CrazyViz_01.pdf (297.7 KB)
