Awhile back I picked up an Arduino to play with. They are pretty fun to mess around with and seem very flexible as to what they are hooked up too or running. I scrounged around the printer grave hard until I found a Lexmark that had a serial LCD display poking out. Some quick screwdriver work liberated it, and then I looked up the data sheet on it, grabbed a tutorial from Lady Adda on LCD’s, and ended up with this.

It spits out random sentences on the top and bottom every so often. So it could say Chuck Norris… Caught fire. Ostrich… Ate a Banana. etc. Not useful, but kind of cool.

Heres what my lil controller for upcoming circuit bending projects looks like. Gotta love reusing old PC power supplies, they rule for little project boxes.

It has 2 rows of just normal old throw switches and two Potentiometers that run down into some old parallel ports that I ripped off some old computers. This way you can take an old printer cable, hack it in half, and solder the loose ends into what ever electronic device you want to break bend. So now its just a matter of ripping something open and playing with the wacky sounds.