Simple ways to circuit bend a toy

Step 5 Soldering the bends to the circuit board

Now that we've found a set of interesting bends, it's time to make the connections permanent.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind here:

• Make sure you provide long enough leads for your new part (the pot, a switch, etc.) to reach from your mounting location on/in the toy to the place on the circuit board
• It's often good to provide a way to override or remove a particular bend from the circuit. That's exactly what I've done with the pitch bend, and I've provided a switch that allows me to choose whether or not to enable the pitch bend (i.e., connect the pot to ground).
• Also, a reset switch is a must; this enables quick recovery in case you crash the processor :-)
• Check to see that your leads pass through whatever holes you need them to go through before you solder them. I forgot to do this on one of my switches here and had to redo it.