The breadboarded monster has finally been turned into a functional prototype!
The lm386 circuit I’d mentioned a bit ago here did the trick, so I just transferred the whole thing to a breadboard and slapped an Atmega168 (bootloaded with Arduino) under it. The unit has the full mic circuit on top (with mic and warm white 8,000 LED) and the Atmega circuit on the bottom with a 5v regulator-conditioned power in on one side and a 4-pin power-ground-RX-TX male header set on another. The two boards connect by a short ribbon-style cable and two header sets, as is better visible here:
I wholly underestimated how long it would take putting this version together — getting all the components into a space this small and hand-soldering all the connections took two full days. I always forget how long wiring circuits on perfboards can take if it’s this dense.
I’m still planning on making a proper Arduino shield eventually, but this idea hit me while I was doing the documentation:
This wouldn’t work with the pin outs I’ve used, but it could be made to work in the next version quite easily, and would be outstanding to have. The ability to swap-and-play with different sensors on the fly is something that just blows my mind. Of course, whatever I think is cool will be made infinitely better by the general hacker populace, so this will be made freely available for further mucking about once I’ve got the circuit 100% done and put on PCB’s.
And as these pictures don’t explain it that well, it’s really tiny:
This is small, but the PCB version will be much smaller (and hopefully integrate the battery into its design a bit better). I still have to figure out a way to package them attractively, which will take some shopping around and some prototyping. I want the final version to be cased in a translucent skin (to let the light through but hide the science), and it’d be nice if it was pleasant to touch. I’ve had this discussion a few times lately, but it’s especially relevant here — if you want people to really attach themselves to an item and make full use of it, it has to be something they can relate to. Good-looking artifacts do much better in most cases than ugly, awkward devices.
I’ve taken to calling this little cube Soundbox, and it seems to fit. I’d been struggling with a name during the earlier stages of prototyping, but it became clear during the testing of this one that what it was really doing was amplifying my own sense of hearing — it was turning the sounds I was actively or passively ignoring around me into light in a way that caught my attention. As I thought more about the amplification idea, the name became clearer — in musical instrument terms, a sound box is the part of the instrument or speaker that augements the sound and gives it color. From Wikipedia’s entry:
A sound box or sounding box, (sometimes written soundbox), is an open chamber in the body of a musical instrument which alters the instrument’s tone quality by modifying the way the instrument resonates. Most instruments respond more strongly to vibrations at certain frequencies, known as resonances. The sound box typically adds resonances at lower frequencies, enhancing the lower-frequency response of the instrument.
The purpose of the sound box is to amplify the volume of the instrument,[1] but it also gives the instrument its distinctive sound. A sound box is found in most string instruments.[2] The most notable exceptions are some electrically amplified instruments like the solid body electric guitar or the electric violin, and the piano which uses only a sound board instead. Drumhead lutes such as the banjo or erhu have at least one open end of the sound box covered with animal skin (or a skin-like acrylic material). Open back banjos are normally used for clawhammer and frailing, while those used for bluegrass have the back covered with a resonator.
Loudspeakers also are mounted on a sound box to enhance their output, particularly bass speakers.
So, while that’s a bit all over the place, the point is that it works for the project: I’m giving people little boxes that augment the sounds around them. The question is what they’ll find out from that, and proper user testing should give me a good deal more on that shortly.
Post a Comment