Learn the Different Parts of Electronics for Circuit Bending

Video Transcript

"AMANDA CLAIRE: So, I personally like circuit bending kids' toys, because they're colorful, they got lights on them, they have cool sounds. The circuit boards in kids' toys tend to be relatively simple compared to the circuit boards that are in kind of battery-powered keyboards, larger ones, especially like some of the Casio keyboards. So, I like kids' toys and so I've got just this one opened that you saw me open it, and just want to kind of give you sort of the basic anatomy of a kid's battery-powered sound-making toy. Everyone looks different inside, but there are also a lot of things that they have in common. So, for example, they all have the power supply, so that's what this is. This is where the batteries are stored. You get into it from the other side. Two terminals here, a black and a red. And so they're going to the power supply on the circuit board. This is obviously the main circuit board, this is where we're going to be messing around. Some toys will have multiple circuit boards in them, so you might want to look around and make sure there's not one hiding somewhere else. This one probably doesn't, but it might have another circuit, kind of maybe underneath this panel if we were to take it up, you see this has a bunch of screws in it, so--. But--so, you want to know where the power supply is, you want to know where the circuit board is. You don't want to break this kind of connection, 'cause you need it to be working while you're working on it, so you can listen to it. So be careful when you're opening it. This is the speaker here. This particular speaker seems to be not screwed in place, but just kind of sort of wedged in place, maybe it's glued. They're attached different ways; sometimes they're glued, wedged, screwed in, but that's what the speaker looks like from the back. And then, all of these buttons that you see on the front, let me tilt it up, you see all those little buttons and switches on the front, all of those are making contacts on basically simple switch circuits that are going to be underneath this panel and underneath this one and under this one. So, I mean, every toy is different, but the things that they have in common, again, are going to be--they're all going to have a power supply and a main circuit board, sometimes another circuit board in there somewhere you might want to hunt for. Make sure you don't break those connections. Then they're almost always going to have a speaker in them, and so the speakers kind of the big, round thing that you're screwdriver sticks to 'cause it has a little magnet in it. And then there will be some sort of way that the buttons on the front of the toy sort of make connections that activate this circuit. So, the next thing we'll do is start taking this apart and kind of get look a little bit more in detail about what we've got on the circuit board."