The Theremin Project : Part 1

About a month ago, I decided to start on a new project that I've been wanting to do for quite some time : building a theremin. It has to be one of the most bizarre instruments ever conceived, and is responsible for a lot of awesome space sounds from 50's Sci-Fi movies. Who am I to resist such a device? You can buy theremins ready-made, but I decided that since I had read in quite a few places that building one wasn't really that complicated, I would give it a shot and maybe I would actually learn something about electronics along the way. (Although mine isn't going to look quite as crazy as the one in the picture. Incidentally, that's Leon Theremin, the inventor pictured above.)

I started by buying a theremin kit online (since I doubt that I would ever be able to find one in Ottawa) and got one from Australia in a couple of weeks. When I opened it up, I was greeted by several pouches of resistors, capacitors, transistors, knobs, switches, antennae and all sorts of stuff I couldn't easily identify. So I brought the instructions with me on the trip to Toronto and had a pretty good read-over on the train. I came back with a little better feel for what I was going to do.

I finally felt comfortable enough to try getting started on the building this weekend, and did I ever make a lot of progress. Armed with my trusty voltmeter from Radio Shack (pre-The Source) and soldering iron, I began. The first step is to get the components on the circuit board, starting with the resistors. Once I had sorted them all out into their respective ohmages, I started soldering away. (Click photos to enlarge)


By this point, I had gotten pretty comfortable with soldering the components and had even started developing a bit of a knack for creating good joints (although the first few might have been a little ugly). After testing with the voltmeter, everything seemed to be working okay, so I continued on with the integrated circuits (the chips in the middle, which have to be in the right place and the right way up) and then all the different types of capacitors.


So this is about as far as I managed to make it over the course of an afternoon. I really hope it works okay (eventually); I'm not really sure how to troubleshoot this thing, but we'll see how it goes, I guess. Stay tuned for next time, when we'll be getting into the diodes and transistors. Oh yeah!