Inside the Voodoo Magick Box

Dissecting the Voodoo Magick Box. Click on the pics for high res.

The microchip reads:
12C508A
04/POA1
(M) 0203

with (M) being the "Microchip" logo.
The 12C508A is a small 8bit 4MHz PIC chip. If you're thinking about pirating this design, don't bother. A PIC requires a program to be uploaded to it first before it will work. Other than that, this design is fairly standard.

Both resistors are 1000 ohm. One is current limiting for the LED's. One looks to be in line with the electrode output (probably for current limiting protection, don't fry your brain).

Capacitators:
Closest to microchip: 104
Closest to battery: K5K
Both of these appear to be filtering the voltage regulator.

The diode prevents damage if the battery is reversed.

Voltage regulator: MC78L 05ACP 224
On the back it says K5.
This is a TO-92 packaged 5v regulator. data sheet

A comment or two. The output would be considered "mono" in audio terms. While this may sound bad for audio, this is quite standard and usually desirable for CES equipment. To contrast it, a "stereo" version would be more likely to use some type of frequency modulation for the brainwave manipulation. This would be much more complicated and may not give the intended results. As touched on before, it is unclear what frequencies (or varied frequencies) the PIC chip programming would output. I'm not overly clear how the PIC chip would invert the voltage for the bottom half of the wave form. This needs to be scoped for clarity.

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Additional Notes

After writing out a schematic of the Voodoo Magick Box from the above photos it became obvious that this circuit based on the ATTiny13 is very similar in design and function. While it would still be interesting to see an original Voodoo box on a scope, this AVR based circuit would appear to work nearly identically to the Voodoo Magick Box. The trick to getting a zero-crossing pulse, or a pulse that appears to go both positive and negative to the observer, lies in the orientation of the observer. Technically the PIC and the AVR circuits have no negative voltage output, but the outputs (ear clips) are connected to separate data output pin on the microcontroller. This means when one pin (ear clip) is "high", the other acts as ground. Basically the ground switches places on each pulse, which to the observer appears to be a negative pulse every other cycle.

Additionally, after building and testing the ATTiny13 circuit from Hack Canada's site, it is confirmed to work as a true CES device. Of course the best part is that code for the ATTiny13 circuit is available for download and modification, so people can resume building their own Voodoo Magick Box's.