Senior Project Update

And so it is another Senior Project update.  This past week I made a lot of progress on my project.  I got the microphones to recognize sound, but I couldn't have done it without the amazing help of my professor Joe Mckay.

I'm debating two things right now.  Do I use microphones I find out of old cellphones, headphones, and speakers or do I buy a bunch of electret microphones that are already wired with a preamp from SparkFun.com.

Advantages
Repurposed Microphones	Breakout Board for Electret Microphone
Keeping with the idea of repurposing materials Could be more interesting Could cause surprising outputs	The wiring will be much simpler, meaning less soldering and work Wiring will be cleaner and less tinkering All microphones will have the same preamp settings
Disadvantages
More work and tinkering Wiring could get extremely messy and hard to follow Would have to make a ton of different preamps Chances of shorting out a speaker are a lot higher	The idea of repurposing the mics will be lost Having something predictable could take away from fascinating unpredictable things that could happen Could be losing a very important aesthetic to my project

I think it is extremely important to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of each method before committing to a decision.  I am currently trying to use repurposed microphones to follow the aesthetic of my project.  I was tinkering with an old speaker Joe gave me.

Old Speaker

I actually got some pretty good results.  I have been using a preamp circuit from http://reconnsworld.com/forum/read.php?9,10.

*Borrowed from a post by user Andrew on Reconnsworld.com

Here is a few examples of the wiring I did with the microphone and the motor:

Side view of wiring for microphone and motor

Above view of wiring, breadboard, and Arduino

Above view of wiring for motor and microphone

I have been experimenting on getting the sound to control the speed of the motor.  I have been using an old computer fan.

Old computer fan

The only difference between my wiring and the wiring in the simple preamp diagram is that instead of using 10K resistors I switched them out for two 500K potentiometers.  Then I could manually adjust the resistance until I found a resistance that worked well with the microphone I was using.

Well that is pretty much it for now.  Soon I will show you a preview of the code that I am working on in processing, but I didn't want to bombard you all with too much nerdyness in one day.  Thanks for checking it out!

Tweet