Radio Discovered in Keyboard Hack

A thirteen year old student at one of our workshops hacks in a simple electrode that receives radio when touched.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Roth Mobot
• rothmobot
• Tommy Stephenson
• Patrick McCarthy
• circuit bending
• bent
• toy hacking
• bet toy
• Chicago
• experimental electronics

[farmerwardy]

i had this very same issue years ago with an electronic keyboard......

It was picking up the police radios across the street !!!!

[RothMobot]

@farmerwardy It was pretty much caused by the rats nest of wire inside the device (which, by the way, was installed by the factory). Anytime there are unshielded wires longer than eight inches one runs the risk of creating an antenna.

[RothMobot]

A "hack" is an intentional alteration to a device. A "bend" is an intuitive exploration of a circuit. A "glitch" is an alteration that scrambles a device's circuitry. A "fluke" is when a device naturally does any of the above without any alterations from the user - like when an amp randomly picks up radio signals.

The keyboard doesn't receive a radio signal until the student touches the body contact he installed (hacked) into the upper corner of the keyboard. It never did until he installed it.

[korydeath]

not a hack i had a guitar amp that the radio would come through and my old bassist his amp would pick up the mexican radio station....... this is my opinion though!

[RothMobot]

@korydeath It didn't do it until the student grounded one of the contacts inside the keyboard with his finger. You're right, it's not a hack -- it's a bend. A hack is when you know what is going to happen, a bend is when it comes unexpectedly via exploration.

[zacdee316]

There are probably some coils inside of the keyboard. Something similar to this happened to my electronics teacher. He had made fm transmitter and was fooling around with it. His neighbor came over and asked him to help him. He said his toaster was talking. So my teacher started to fuck around with it and discovered that the toaster's coils were picking up his signal and vibrating enough that you could hear him talking on it. I'm sure that is what it is. The probe just uses you as an antenna.