Sound Detection With The Arduino
I decided on Saturday that I'd try my hand at building a setup with the Arduino to detect sound. I found the perfect schematic online here from the guys over at SparkFun.com. They have a really nice breakout board for an Electret Microphone but it's ~$8.00 and I already had the stuff on hand to build my own. I think I'll still pick one of theirs up at some point, just to have around. It's quality built and tiny. I've attached the Schematic and the code with additional high-res pictures below for anyone more interested. I used an OpAmp to increase the voltage and had the code check for a threshold. Once the threshold had been exceeded, it would light up the red LED. The end result looks very similar to one of the old-school VU meters. You can adjust the gain on the amp by increasing the R5 resistor. This would make an excellent sound detector or even could be hooked up to a small speaker, it's a simplistic mono-amplifier after all...
Caption :
File name : ElectretMICProject.zip
Size : 1 MB
- Title : ElectretMICProject
Caption :
File name : ElectretMICProject.zip
Size : 1 MB
Communicating With Ardunio Using Micrsoft .NET (C#)
Being a .Net developer, I figured I needed to know how to get my applications to talk to the Ardunio board via the USB serial port. Took a few hours to get the Ardunio code working, but here is the final results.
I setup a simple VS2008 C# project (you'll need to modify to compile with VS2005) to turn a LED on and off by clicking a button on the form. You'll need to change the hard-coded COM port to the correct one for your setup and hook up the LED (don't forget your resistor) to the digial PIN 12 on the Ardunio board.
- A few things to note:
- I'm using a fixed char command "INLENGTH" which will need to be updated if you wish to increase the command char length.
- I've used # to pad the command when I don't have a 6 char command.
- LED must be on digital PIN 12 (you can change this in the code of course).
- COM port is hard-coded in the .Net code for my setup, change to correct COM port on our computer.
- Title : ArduinoSerialCommTest
Caption :
File name : ArduinoSerialCommTest.zip
Size : 43 kB
- Title : ArduinoSerialCommTest
Caption :
File name : ArduinoSerialCommTest.zip
Size : 43 kB
Learning To Count Again..
I decide to stop by Radio Shack and pick up a seven segment LED (RHDP) so I could learn to use it with my Arduino board. I had actually ordered a few from Jameco but I had a couple of hours to kill today so I decided to feed my impulse. The cool thing about these displays is that they are really easy to use. You can see in the pictures there are lots of wires, it basically takes 1 digital output per segment and a common ground to run it (I didn't use the decimal point), but really the coding was super simple. Ignore all those resistors on the picture below, I didn't have a 68ohm resistors so I had to improvise with some lower ohm resistors put in series. This is a very satisfying project and only took me about 45mins from start to finish, highly recommended for those new to the Arduino board... I've included a ZIP file with the code and a few hi-res pictures for anyone instrested.
- Title : SevenSegmentLED
Caption :
File name : SevenSegmentLED.zip
Size : 1 MB
- Title : SevenSegmentLED
Caption :
File name : SevenSegmentLED.zip
Size : 1 MB
Lockheed Martin’s MKV kicks major butt!
If you haven't seen this thing yet, you gotta check it out. Check out the video, this is for real...
Building your own PCBs
I ran across this article while shopping at SparkFun.com. They outline s
ome very good tips for eliminating quality issues with the boards you submit to the fab houses. If you use Eagle to build your boards, I strongly suggest you utilize their DRC and CAM files to get yourself started in the right direction. These guys have added so much to the community it's amazing.
The wonderous Arduino board…
A few weeks back my wife decided to send me a link at work with some DIY doggie stairs project. A subtle sugestion I think to get me to add this to my list of DIY pojects...in all honesty I figured this was just the project to get my mind of the madness of work. Besides, it would allow me to fire up my lovely collection of power tools, I decided right then to move this project to the top of my list. I headed out to Google to research (as I do with all my projects). After a few hours reading through the numerous DIY doggie stairs projects I found one here that I thought I'd use as the framework for my project.
You'll quickly see why I chose this one to base my project off of. It involved electronics! I very quickly dismissed the idea of using the motion dector he used, too bulky, too hack-n-slash and not challenging enough for me. I decided to go about building it from scratch. This is when I got re-introduced to the Wonderous Arudino Board.
I say re-introduced as I had read about these a few months earlier but was far too pre-occupied with one of my other hobbies (metallic reloading). These things are amazing, I've opened up a whole universe of learning with this one...