Oct 15, 2007
Soundtrack of our life
The working title title for my project is “soundtrack of our life”. The idea for this project derives for one of my earlier works. A sound installation for an mp3 player: where the viewer/ listener was offered an ipod set to play a huge amount of various samples on random. Changing the experience of the surrounding by changing the sound scape. This time i would like it to be possible for the sound to change because of the listeners actions/movements.
Sensor input would change the sound. Ideally the user should be able to carry the set around.
Technical solutions are something where i only have some vague ideas at the moment. I do think that i need a sound source, sensors and a micro-controller that communicates with them both.
mp3 player – iPod is very integrated device which is very difficult to install any sensors on it. So called Daisy Mp3 player is designed for controlling by a microcontroller. You can communicated them via digitalWrite, parallel and serial communication. If you utilize only digitalWrite with very simple code on Arduino, you can make a random sound selection from 16 tracks while the Arduino detect values from sensors. If you use serial communication, you can control mp3 from 65000 tracks. I bought this device before but the serial communication hasn’t worked well yet.
http://www.teuthis.com/html/daisy_mp3.html
sensors – please specify what kind of sensor you want to use in your project. The following online shops offers the sensors which are relatively easy to install. Of course, they are often expensive. If you want to save money, you need to learn very deep engineering techniques 🙂
Acroname Inc
http://www.acroname.com/
iCube
http://infusionsystems.com/
Parallax, Inc
http://www.parallax.com/
Spark Fun Electronics
http://www.sparkfun.com/
Velleman Kit
http://www.velleman.be/es/en/product/list/?id=366970
Lawicel AB
http://www.lawicel-shop.se/
Robotshop
http://www.robotshop.se/
Well i think it is not the time to learn deep engineering techniques… Yet!
I found a mp3 player board, that should talk to Basic Stamp without though a serial connection.
http://www.roguerobotics.com/products/electronics/ump3
A demo from a project combining the ump3 player and Basic Stamp
http://www.spiderspreyground.com/howto/ump3/
I´m sure that the Hitachi H48C Tri-Axis Accelerometer Module is able to provide all
the sensor input i need for this project.
Great Markku that you didn’t send me the link to my email but put it on this blog! The uMP3 Playback Module seems to work better than Daisy Mp3 player in these points.
– No soldering are needed.
– Pitch control
– Play tones (no files needed)
x about 20euro expensive.
you can utilize Arduino and uMP3 together if you agree that the Arduino is anymore able to communicate with your PC via serial. Because Arduino has only one Serial port. BASIC Stamp has 16! There is so called software serial on Arduino but it is very difficult to implement into your Arduino code.
I´m not sure if the 16 serial ports on the Basic stamp board is to much to handle, but i think
that would provide the control that i need. Pitch control and tones sound like good features to have.
BASIC Stamp supports Serial communication for all 16 pins (15pins + 1pin for programming). If you utilize all pins for your project, the memory size for your BASIC Stamp code won’t probably enough. But if I chose any pin for the serial, this freedom of choise really help me when I design a circuit for my project.