About

Beam camp is a kids camp held in New Hampshire, where their mission is to cultivate hands-on skills while exploring innovative thinking, design and the creative process. The camp invites counselors to run special workshops. For our workshop, Mike Cohen, Susan Ngo and I had the campers build sonic robots. We started by designing a sound amplifier and synthesizer, based on circuits found in Nicolas Collins' Handmade Electronic Music. Our sound amplifier used a LM386. The synthesizer uses a 4093 oscillating circuit. We designed a pcb to make it easier for the campers to put it together. They added potentiometers and other variable resistors to change the sounds coming out of the oscillation circuit. We built a robot as an example and had the campers design and build their own.