TomTom was a special creation for my long-time friend Andrew Reitsma (qrux) for his birthday in November of 2002.

It started as one of those cheap Chinese drum machines that have been reiterated over and over with the same sound chip but different plastics. I added an optical resistor for pitch control, a potentiometer sticking out of the top for slo-pitch dial-in, and a super-fast rabbit button on the side. Also, there is a 1/8" output and a custom paintjob. Neat-o.

These are remarkably easy to modify and used to be quite ubiquitous, but somehow are now getting scarce. I'd love to find more of these...I only have one more waiting for the iron.

Thanks to Andrew for the pix and recordings. I forgot to do this before I gave it to him...

Here is TomTom in its box. I left it original because it was too good as it was unmodified. I did, however, create a fake warning label of "ChineseJapanglish" for the box by typing a phrase into babelfish and translating it to German, then Russian, then Portuguese, Japanese , and Chinese, then back to English:

"Warning: Actual Gadget can differ from represented product on box remarkably."

I also repeated it in equally fragmented Spanish, German, and French.

Owned by Andrew Reitsma (qrux) and used frequently to its dismay

Audio Bits:

TomTom01.mp3 Pitch up and down
TomTom02.mp3 Nearly normal, slightly slowed down
TomTom03.mp3 Usage of the optical resistor to speed up