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This month, I started two projects that I've been thinking about for a while. For the first, I built something completely new to me, and for the second, I repaired something old.

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One of my favorite tapes is Sounds of Summer: Field Recordings of Solar Electronics by my friend Max Hamel. Their handmade synthesizers respond to the level of sunlight over two fifteen-minute recordings, set within the ambient sounds of the city. It comes with a mini-zine where Max explains how they made the circuits, and I always come away from reading it feeling inspired. At the end of the zine, they share a link to Electronic Entomology, a site that practically sits at the intersection of all my interests. There are no photos of actual insects, so I encourage both the bug-loving and the bug-averse to check out the site. Knowing that all of this is possible, it was only a matter of time before I tried it myself.

The desire to build my own synth lived in the back of my mind until I came across a collection of free zines by Iffy Books, one of which is a step-by-step guide to Build a Solar-Powered Music Synth. Then, that desire nagged at me every day until this month, when I finally built my own synth! I'm not going to recount all of the steps here; that's what the zine is for. It's a great resource and I recommend giving it a read. (I also recommend building your own!)

I started this with essentially no electronics experience, but I did have some help. When I asked Ben if he happened to have any of the required materials, and he kindly put together a bag of supplies for me that included everything but the integrated ciruit and the solar panel. He also offered advice when I was shopping for those parts, and answered my questions during assembly. Thank you Ben! <3

I wasn't able to find a retailer with both of the specific parts from the zine in stock (besides Amazon, which I refuse to use), so I ended up buying the following:

Those who took a detour to read the zine may have noticed that it calls for integrated circuits with NOT gates, not NAND gates, but that's not a problem. NAND gates are extremely versatile, so I was able to use them for what I needed by making a few adjustments to the cicuit setup.

A NOT gate is an inverter with one input and one output. An input of false (0) becomes an output of true (1) and vice versa. A NAND gate has more complicated logic: there are two inputs and the output is only false when both inputs are true. You can reduce the complexity by connecting the two inputs with a jumper wire so they'll always have the same value, turning the NAND gate into the functional equivalent of a NOT gate. Combinations of NAND gates can be used to make any type of logic gate.

Small bumps of metal connect two cables to a small solar panel.

My second major divergence from the zine's instructions was using a solar panel thats came without leads, so I had to attach them myself. This was my first time using a soldering iron! Ben demonstrated the technique, then I repeated it with a second panel and I think I did a decent job. Soldering was easier and more fun than I ever imagined it would be. Watching the metal melt instantly was sooooooooo extremely satisfying. I connected a cable to each of the two solder pads and tinned the stranded wires on the other end of the cables. Because of the tinning, I skipped the part of the zine about connecting the strands to Dupont wires with a wire nut. Putting the tinned ends straight into the breadboard worked well enough.

Ben told me the piezo speaker was originally a part of a toy cash register that his siblings played with as children; it makes me happy to give an old part a new purpose. The speaker is a disc about the size and color of a U.S. quarter coin, and it is very quiet. At first I thought I might be able to make it louder by supplying the solar panel with more light (more power!), but when I brought the synth into direct sunlight, it stopped producing sound entirely. It can only tolerate so much. Though the synth is solar-powered in name, the light of a desk lamp (with several hundred times fewer lumens than sunlight) is enough.

A simple circuit with two buttons, two resistors, a solar panel, and a small disc which is the speaker.

To play it, I hold my middle finger on the first button to complete the circuit and produce sound, then use my index finger to press the second button, which switches the output between a steady(ish) tone and something more like chirping. Twisting the potentiometer makes a barely perceivable change, so I mostly ignore it. Most of the variety comes from me moving my hand over the solar panel, depriving it of light and power. The resulting sound is high-pitched and squeaky, often cicadalike and occasionally birdlike.

Waving my hand around reminds me of playing a theremin, though there's a lot less control here. More noise than notes. It feels less like playing an instrument and more like interferring with some process that will go on with or without me. I enjoy it a lot.


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While arguably more mundane than the first project, this one is motivated by a more urgent problem: Ben and I had clothes with holes in them! I have a needle and thread that I've used for previous repairs, so no purchases or guides were required. I never learned how to sew properly, so maybe a guide would be helpful, but I'm stubbornly sticking to my ways for now.

Ben's shorts had a hole in the pocket, which finally reached the size where a pen could fall through, rendering them useless. The hole was near a loose thread in the seam, so I folded the whole damaged area over and started looping thread around it, with no particular attention to pattern. Just looping and looping until it felt study, and tying a knot on each end. The once round pocket edge is now a little squared off, but pockets aren't visible to the outside world, so it doesn't matter what they look like. What matters is that they stay together, and a pocket that I repaired with this method about two years ago is still together! It's easy and it works.

I bought my favorite pair of jeans secondhand, so I can't be sure exactly how old they are, but the brand and the cut lead me to believe they're from the '90s. They fit me perfectly and I love them. I should have reinforced the button hole as soon as it started showing signs of wear, but instead I waited until it became a big frayed mess.

Frayed fabric around a button hole.

My first idea was to add more fabric, so I cut a rectangular piece from my previous favorite pair of jeans (which tragically met their end while I was climbing over some auditorium seats), cut a new button hole in the middle of it, and placed it against the damaged hole on the interior side of the pants. This did not go well. I struggled to hold it in place while I put the first few loops of thread through (I realized days later that I should have used a safety pin) and the material was quickly falling apart into another mess of fraying threads. I eventually tossed it, feeling dejected.

The bottom half of the button hole wasn't as damaged as the top half, so I started again there, using the tried and true "many loops" method. Somehow, without much effort, things were looking considerably better, so my confidence returned and I worked my way around to the top half of the button, trying to lock in as much material as I could.

No more frayed fabric, but the button hole has more of a gap than what's normal.

It's not perfect, but it feels considerably more sturdy! The gap at the top isn't going to close without adding some new fabric to replace what was lost, so I'm planning to make another attempt to reinforce it. Instead of trying to add a whole new layer of fabric, maybe I'll add something just big enough to fill the gap and lock it in with thread. Or maybe I'll actually look up a guide to fixing button holes next time.