Project Audio

Amanda (http://amandaimperial.wordpress.com/), Rebecca(http://arduinohackers.wordpress.com/), and I teamed up once again to work on a project, deemed Project Audio. This was a smaller scale project for practice in preparation for the big final project. For this one, we needed to incorporate a speaker and a microphone.We came up with the idea to make something that detects temperature, and when you speak to it, it will talk back and light up either green (room temperature), red (warm), or blue (cold).

We ran into an issue early on, where we were using a capacitor instead of a thermistor (some of them do look very much alike). We fixed this issue, but we were struggling to get the temperature reading just right. We tried changing resistors, thermistors, code…but with no difference in results. Finally, we went to the professor for help. She showed us a diagram of how to wire a thermistor–turns out, we were wiring it wrong. After fixing this, the thermistor was working splendidly.

Now we just needed to fix the microphone. We had tested some mic code earlier, so we altered that for the rest of the project. The mic was tricky about detecting sound. We never did get it to work perfectly, but it works well enough. After adjusting the mic and the range for the temperature, our project was done. When we made noise or tapped the mic, the speaker would make a sound depending on the temperature; the higher the temperature, the higher the pitch. Originally we wanted the speaker to output something like a .wav with custom commentary, but we didn’t get that implemented in time. Regardless, it’ still cool.

Project Audio – Complete.