every year, electrical engineering students at ucla pick an ieee project to fill their time and bolster their extracurriculars/jeopardize their gpa. due to my tendency to do the latter, the student project initiative project seemed to be the most obvious choice: "free" money to create projects that may or may not work, but that they are glad to invest in. my self-driven endeavor of choice was to create musical intruments using random electronic parts, in particular (but not limited to) a barcode scanner and a fan. as with many of my decisions, this one was done in a spontaneous moment of motivation and hunger, and like many such decisions the results are equal parts impressive (depending on how easily impressed you are) and disappointing (depending on how strict you are). perhaps i was holding off making this page for a long time exactly because of how disappointed i was in this project, but like my voltage multiplier i believe it deserves a spot in josh's engineering portfolio for friends and family.
the one working thing in this project is the barcode scanner synth, which only marginally works. it is a digital barcode scanner that employs a 2d laser reading unit to collect information from assorted black lines.