Search the Community

I opened this thread because I stumbled across an interesting effect lately. It is not necessarily a paranormal effect but weird at least. I called the resulting device "Spica", a phonetic acronym for "Spirit Chaos" generator. Moreover Spica is the brightest star in the constellation Virgo. By beginning of October 2021 I wanted to built a simple electronical square wave oscillator. This work was related to my ongoing research with the VISPRE. Really no big thing to realize this function by use of the NE555. This circuit is one of the most famous in the world. It is a simple and clever made timing circuit that can be utilized in monostable or astable (oscillating) mode and it was so successful that it flooded the electronic community and industry since the early 1970's in an abundance of applications. This circuit still is produced in number of about 1 billion/year(!) and there are NE555-competitions in the internet of the craziest things you can use a NE555 for. I used this circuit in various aplications as well. Now, in October 2021 I wanted to realize this very simple square wave application with the NE555. However curiously, in my breadboard layout I made a mistake. I forgot to tie together two pins that are controlling the upper and lower trigger levels for the oscillation. It turned out that by omitting the connection between pins 2 and 6 the NE555 showed a very strange behavior I never witnessed before. Instead of emitting just one fixed frequency as I wanted it to generate and what is the only way a NE555 can work, a whole group of frequencies were generated simultaneously almost like a chord. I had implemented a potentiometer that originally just was provided to tune the frequency. Now, turning this poti made the groups of simultaneous tones jump from one configuration to another one with different compositions. Those areas were intermitted by small areas of noise. Obviously the circuit was generating very complex patterns of oscillations. Because the frequencies were rather high (100KHz - 330 KHz) and only partially in the audible range I thought about converting them down to the audible range by using a binary counter stage that divided the frequencies by 2 in every stage. Because the counter has 11 stages I could tap the audio signal very comfortably at the stage where I got the best sound. This video gives yo an impression about the oscillating patterns. Projekt_10-17_SD 360p_MEDIUM_FR30.mp4 At this point I reached out for Jeff to support me with his knowledge and skills.