Experience the Unseen World of Dust Particles.
This circuit amplifies signals from dust particles dancing in the sunlight of your room and converts them into a symphony of buzzing sounds, reminiscent of flies. It's not just a gadget; it's an experience that heightens your awareness of the environment around you.
This circuit offers you plenty of opportunities to experiment. You can use various sources of a low power signal at input, such as:
Photodiodes: Two are included in the kit. These miniature sensors react to various artificial and natural light sources, such as lightbulbs, screens, sun rays scattered by leaves, sand particles falling in front of the sensor, light reflected from water, mirrors, prisms... And they look very cool too!
Solar cells: Two are included in the kit. Because of their larger surface area, even the tiniest particles, invisible to the naked eye, trigger Sun Flies' enchanting response.
Coils and inductors: You can listen to electromagnetic fields emitted from various electronic devices. While there are many ready-made devices that do this, here you can experiment with your own designs and make various coils and antennae to carry around, that are easy to swap thanks to the 4-pin header used at input.
Sensor Ensemble: You can attach various other sensors to the amplifier, any that output small voltage signals. We can't wait to see what else you will think up!
Sun Flies was sitting on a open window and dust from the street triggered this sound.
Solar cells + dust particles:
with a bit of self-oscillation:
We attached Solar cells and took SunFlies to the beach. It converted moving sand to the buzzing sound.
Solar cells + sand:
Relaxing in front of a fire, Sun Flies was catching the mesmerizing dance of flames.
Solar cells + fire:
Sun Flies met my phone and you can hear how it reacted to the encounter of its display and radio waves.
Photodiodes + phone OLED:
Inductor coil + phone EMC:
(you can play and mix more of them at once ;)
IR remote + photodiodes, raw and processed through Loopsynth's channels #34 and #342:
Self-oscillations and noises, for example when the circuit is being tuned by adjusting the potentiometers:
Discover a new way to create sound and bring the microscopic world closer to your ears.
An interesting hobby that combines DIY crafting with technology.
Learn about electronic circuits, sound and light.
Increase the awareness about air quality in your environment.
This DIY kit includes everything you need to build your own Sun Flies. It might not be the best kit for a complete beginner, but with some basic soldering experience you will be able to bring Sun Flies to life.
There is no built-in speaker. The headphone connector is a standard 3.5mm jack. Please be careful as the signal coming out from the device might be sometimes quite loud mainly when the sensor connection is mechanically disturbed and is not making a good contact. Because this is primarily intended for recording, there is no quick way to adjust the volume. There are two potentiometers to control amplifier gain, but they are the multi-turn type, so it takes a while for them to go through the whole range - their purpose is to fine-tune the gain to match various sensors. It's a good idea to take your headphones off while powering the circuit on or off. Also, please make sure that it is powered off while you are changing the sensors.
While the circuit is typically powered from a 9V battery via the barrel jack connector, you can use a lower voltage source as well. It works fine from a 3V, 4.5V or 6V source (for example 2-4 AA cells with a suitable battery holder). The powering voltage makes a small difference - when powered from lower voltage, the output volume is slightly lower. The power consumption at 9V is 14.5mA, and at 3V it is 4.5mA.
You can record the sounds from Sun Flies just as if you recorded from any other device with a line-out or headphones output, by connecting it to a mixer or a sound card. You can use a headphone splitter cable to hear what you are recording, or use multiple pairs of headphones to share the experience, it will not overload the output.
