Andy Chuong, Brady Risendal, and Kristof Klipfel
ATLS 3519 – Object
Project 2: Artificial Human Companion
Rockstar
Description and Summary of Project:
For our project, we decided to create a “stuffed rock” that plays rock music. The goal of this is to have a teddy bear-like companion that plays music. This would be an object you could lay in bed with, place on your desk, throw across the room, or punch. The initial plan was to be able to throw the figure and have it played music based off of the acceleration of the figure but had trouble with . We also wanted to have the figure have a squeezable feature similar to many stuffed animals.
The process of creating this object started with the enclosure. We cut up a pair of jeans we found in the BTU Lab. To create the sphere like shape we used the template below:
After cutting out the piece into the shape of our template, we used hot glue to “stitch” the figure together. We left one seam open to allow us to remove/add stuffing to the inside. We also left a hole on the left and right sides to add speakers. To give our sphere/rock a companion feel, we added googley eyes to it.
The next step was to figure out the electronics for this. We wanted to be able to enclose the figure and not have external wires. To do this, we tried a couple different audio shields and break out boards.
The first one was the SparkFun Audio-Sound Breakout Board. (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11125)
It turned out to be more of a hassle than we had planned. The first problem we ran into with this board was that it needed a 1GB micro SD card which is surprisingly hard to find nowadays. After finding one online and waiting for it to arrive, we tried triggering audio again. Even with the correct micro SD card, we still weren’t able to get an audio output. We checked everything with a multimeter and our circuit seemed to be good. The only strange occurrence was a constant change in input voltage to the board. After a while we decided to change boards and go for the Sparkfun MP3 Player Shield.
The second one (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12660)proved to be much better. We were able to stack the shield right on top of the Redboard and successfully feed power to it. We then followed the Sparkfun MP3 Shield Tutorial. ( https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/mp3-player-shield-hookup )
After getting the MP3 Shield to play the audio file we needed to increase the volume of the speaker. We originally couldn’t get the speaker to play loud enough. We decided to add the Sparkfun Mono Audio Amp Breakout and used it to boost the volume of the speaker. (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11044)
Personal Impression
Working on this project in a group was a very good experience. I think we all did a pretty equal amount of work and when we ran into errors it was nice having other people to help come up with trouble shooting ideas. I feel like we all learned quite a lot and could reproduce this project individually if we were to do it ourselves. I think doing this project as part of this group was very helpful to me and was also very fun.
Parts:
Project Specific:
Mp3 Shield: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12660
General:
Button
Wire
Male and female crimps
Cloth material (jeans used in this project)
Hot glue
Googley Eyes (Optional)
9v battery with barrel adapter for the Redboard (or another similar power supply)
Wiring Diagram
Made using Fritzing
The Fritzing file can be downloaded from: https://creative.colorado.edu/~anch3636/object/proj2.fzz
Code:
In order to actually get the code working we had to install a separate library called the SFEMP3Shield Library to the Arduino IDE. The library repository can be found here:
We first uploaded one of the simple sketches found in the SFEMP3Shiled library examples called FilePlayer. Once we had the code working through the Serial Monitor we extracted some code from further down and added an if statement to increase the volume to max, trigger, and play the MP3 file with a button click.
if (xValue == 1023){
//Serial.write("+++++++++++++++++++++++");
//Serial.write(1);
MP3player.setVolume(0, 0);
MP3player.playTrack(1);
}
To prevent clutter, the code can be downloaded/viewed from: http://creative.colorado.edu/~anch3636/object/project2_file_player.ino
Images of Final Product
Videos of Final Project
Interaction Diagram
