Onion Madder's Mess O' Pedals
DIY electronics, rebuilt to be readable - by screen readers, at any zoom, on any device.
I build circuit-bent noise machines and write up how they work. I also rescue DIY electronics guides that were going dark - scanned PDFs, image-heavy pages, work by authors who've passed on - and rebuild them as pages you can actually read. The words stay the original author's. Only the HTML is mine.
My Own Guides
Written the way I wish guides were written: pinouts as monospace text you can zoom or hear instead of a blurry photo, wiring as a table with one row per solder joint, and parts lists that tell you how to recognise the part - the stripe, the notch, the cap code.
Dead-Bug Hive
Six oscillators on one CD40106, dead-bugged into a tin. The most complete guide here.
Read the guide »Dead-Bug Mosquito
A point-to-point NE556 noise box, built with no circuit board at all.
Read the guide »The Archive
Other people's work, kept reachable. Every mirror is credited to its author, keeps their text exactly as they wrote it, and gets real headings, described images, and text that survives being zoomed to 400%.
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Ray Wilson · 1957–2016
Music From Outer Space
Ray taught a generation to build synths from scratch. He died in 2016 and his site has been fading ever since. The Weird Sound Generator, the Mini Mixer, the Micro Sample & Hold - rebuilt here, schematics and all, with his own words untouched.
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Darren C. Shaw
Lo-fi sampler & PT2399 delay mods
The two mods behind half the noise boxes on this site: turning an ISD1820 voice-recorder board into a pitch-bendable sampler, and breaking the controls out of a PT2399 delay.
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Andy Murkin
Radica UCreate Music multi-FX
A deep teardown of a discontinued toy, turned into a real-time effects unit.
The Bench
Build logs for the things I actually made - a singing skull, a Gooey Louie head turned into a looper, a toy guitar that got opened up and never quite closed again. Photos, mistakes, and what I'd do differently.
The Store
One-of-a-kind pedals, glitch boxes and tape loops. Everything is hand-built and there is exactly one of each - when it's gone, it's gone. Sold with a repair-or-refund promise, because these are prototypes and I'd rather fix it than argue about it.
Why This Site Exists
I've had idiopathic intracranial hypertension since I was twelve. I was told I'd likely be legally blind by forty. I'm forty-two, still here, still building.
So I build things to be read - by screen readers, at any zoom, on any device. Body text here holds the strictest contrast standard rather than the merely-legal one, every figure is described from the actual photograph, and if a design choice can't meet that bar, the design changes. More about me and why this matters »