I didn't think much of the device at first, until I caught my boy singing along with The Ramones' "Blitzkrieg Bop. He knew the melody. He knew the hook. Moreover, he knew he liked it. Even more amazingly, he associated this song, along with hits from Van Halen and Blue Oyster Cult, not with solitary hours spent listening to an iPod or the occasional rush hour classic rock radio block, but with active play.
I still catch him sometimes, windmilling in his room to a captive audience of stuffed animals and Transformers, rocking the hell out on a digital toy guitar for his own amusement. This is apparently not an unusual occurrence, as WowWee's Paper Jamz series continues to carve out impressive shelf space at my local big-box.
They've even expanded the line with a new offering they call Paper Jamz Pro. There are two main differences between this new Pro series and the older line. The first is that the toys are no longer limited to the three pre-loaded songs that defined the early products. The second is that WowWee has now added an additional option for aspiring vocalists.
Like the guitars that are the brand's namesake, the Paper Jamz Pro microphone is actually made primarily out of plastic. It presumably has a musical greeting-card chip with toonz burned in, outputting a teeny fraction of a Watt.
WowWee indeed. If you gonna use the amp with a normal play it yerself guitar chain, you need at least a gain of 10 just to get up to the level of the Paper Jamz "guitar" chip, from there you can go into the Paper Jamz amplifier.
You also need to be able to drive 5K Gain setting can be 10K and ohm resistors. Yes, it is silly to have more Volts on the preamp than the "power" amp.
If you know a good low-volt booster with that much gain, do it. I've been doing a bit of research into capacitive touch Tammy pretty much summed it up: "Are you talking about the touch points controls?
They're capacitive sensing. Right now not very DIY-able as most of the magic is in the microcontroller. Not like I don't have enough projects to keep me busy, but I think I'm gonna pack some bags, lol. PIC looks fun AVR looks "popular" to me I did come across something about a year or so ago on EDN, maybe? ETA: Here's the teardown on the guitar circuit. Quote from: Earthscum on April 23, , AM.
Clamp far end of cord to hold still without you touching it. Dime the amp. Don't be touching amp or other metal. Bring your finger near the plug-tip. There's a buzz. Use any crude high-impedance signal detector to sense the small or large buzz. CMOS offers high impedance and high gain but is prone to static damage. TL is hot and tough. Drive a diode and smoothing cap, diddle gain, you get voltage when finger is "near".
This assumes you are in a room full of wall-power, but are not right next to fusebox or fluorescent lamp. Since the WowWee product is best used far-far outside the house, or the far corner of the basement for least parential damage they surely use something trickier. A 50KHz squarewave couples even better than 60Hz buzz and can't be confused for wall-buzz, but does need a signal source and added wiring.
Actual strings on frets can work as contacts. They will take considerable pressure and wear, as you know. You have to wire every fret, which is a lot of small wires to route in the side of the neck. You probably scan the frets and "take" the hot fret closest to the body, to emulate the speaking-length part of normal string fretting. Electrically it is possible to detect all the contacted frets and do something else, but on a low-action cheaply-fretted guitar you are liable to have more contacts than you expect.
An LPB or two, possibly with output mods, may be the least-investment trick. The saga continues. I'm building a Noisy Cricket practice amp and I plan to install the PaperJamz amp as an MP3 amp in the same enclosure and with separate speakers. The PaperJamz and Noisy Cricket will be independent circuits including their output speakers. For that you'll need an optional extra - the Paper Jamz amp. How much it will fill the time after those school holidays is down to whether or not your kids are into music.
This is your classic Christmas stocking present; great for a week, but unlikely to entice you much more after that. Learn more Home Parenting Parenting reviews. Why you can trust Pocket-lint. Still, while the fun lasts, you'll have a blast. Writing by Stuart Miles.
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