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The Simple Passive Glitcher

For a long time I’ve been wanting to make video glitch hardware but I didn’t know where to start. At a electric flee market I stumbled upon a bag of VGA breakout boards and thought that the VGA signal must be pretty convenient to hack into since all signals are split up on different pins.

the-simple-passive-glitcher

Said and done. I screwed jumper wires to the VGA boards and attached the other ends to a breadboard and started messing around. I measured the R,G and B signals with a multimeter to see how much voltage they carried by sending reed, green and blue test screens through the VGA connector. I compared that to the specifications I found on-line and started messing around with resistors and also adding voltage by attaching sound which worked great. Next I tried messing with the vertical and horizontal sync. That worked for the H-sync but it was very sensitive and only a very small range of the potentiometer could be used.

I never built this into a box because I wanted to find more sophisticated or at least more controlled ways of creating glitches.

One Comment

  1. It’s great! Tell me what you used potentiometers? And can you show the shematic please?

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