Atari Punk Console

Posted Jan 27th 2007 10:45AM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: misc hacks

It seems Hack-A-Day's resident snow bunny has run off to Utah and left me holding the proverbial bag. How could a heart broken hacker possibly console himself? How about the soothing sounds of the Atari Punk Console? Well... soothing is a subjective term, but the screaming, bleeping, fuzzy sound generated by this simple circuit is great. Since their first post on the Atari Punk Console circuit last fall, GetLoFi has collected many different examples of the circuit. It's just a 556, a few caps, and pots so it lends itself easily to modification. The most recent post is built in an actual Atari mouse.

Reader Comments

(Page 1)

1. Wow! Very very cool!

Posted at 11:54PM on Jan 27th 2007 by Hamsterpotpies

2. Hey, its eliot. Hey Eliot!

Posted at 1:30AM on Jan 28th 2007 by austin y.

3. Wow. I never knew Atari even made a mouse. Nice.

Posted at 1:38AM on Jan 28th 2007 by Will O'Brien

4. sweet atari mouse!

You can see my APC project on their page, it's a super fun lil box, I still have the parts to make another one but haven't found a case worthy of it yet. I'm getting tired of mint tins for my stuff.

Posted at 2:15AM on Jan 28th 2007 by nate mc

5. How about hollow-coring a book? find a small hardback book that has a lot of water damage to the pages, or is just booring and cut the center out of all the pages, then glue them all together so as to make the book a box. I am not advocating destroying a perfectly good book, a work of classic literature, or an old out of print book ;) but 'saving money in 10 easy steps' or something like that.

Posted at 5:03AM on Jan 28th 2007 by MRE

6. What happened to the design challenge? Who is the winner?

Posted at 8:05AM on Jan 28th 2007 by jimmy-the-fish

7. The winner will be announced sooooon. It's been a busy time, but we haven't forgotten.

Posted at 10:07AM on Jan 28th 2007 by Will O'Brien

8. Question: can this circuit be used in conjunction with other musical devices, i.e. could I run my electric guitar in to this box, run it out to my amp, and get any kind of odd modulations to my guits sound (guitar, elec piano, anything?) I never got far in to building my own fx pedals, but it would be neat to have something that could add some fuzz, beeps and blips. Either way, I will be building one of these APCs, though I don't want to waste a good project trying to run my guitar through it if thats a bad idea.

Posted at 12:49PM on Jan 28th 2007 by Zak Owen

9. Oh yeah, this is really cool. The Atari punk console will not disappear that's for sure!

Posted at 1:22PM on Jan 28th 2007 by Zebra

10. So...it just makes noises then?

Posted at 4:48PM on Jan 28th 2007 by TJ

11. This is cool but you can sell a atari mouse for over $50 to atari users who need it.

Posted at 9:02PM on Jan 28th 2007 by Atariforever

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