Noise Box joystick (gallery)

This noise effect was built more than 10 years ago. A fun box, mainly consisting of oscillators whose oscillation frequency is controlled by the potentiomers. The box also has a delay effect and two of the knobs adjust the delay.

A customer asked recently (Jan 22) and wanted the pots replaced with a joystick. Many joysticks seem to be designed with on-off function and it is not so interesting here. I found a joystick with two 5k potentiometers that change resistance when you move the stick in the x- and y-direction, respectively. The problem is that the noise box is built with 500k pots. To “translate” 5k to 500k, so to speak, the circuit was equipped with a small perfboard construction. It is a very simple circuit, transistor-based, and if someone else is having the same problem, and wants a simple solution to it, then see the schemaic in picture 4! PCB’s for this construction will come, but it’s no big deal to arrange it on perfboard.

The result? Alright. You can continue working with resistor values ​​R2, R3 to make the LED turn on and off in a suitable way. You can test different types of LDR and different types of LEDs or you can replace the LDR LED with an optocoupler. If you go with the LED-LDR, you can put a piece of tape around them to prevent light from an LDR-LED pair next to it, from reaching the LDR.

The trimmer, which sits parallel to the LDR, sets its maximum resistance. It is usually very large when it is pitch dark and it can be good to have some kind of limit.