Object Project 2 Brief and Pictures

For our project 2 we have decided to build a pet rock that is interpreted in a different way than the well known "Pet Rock". We are going to build a stuffed "rock" that has a microcontroller inside and that plays rock music when triggered.

We hope to have it look like a rock while at the same time giving it some personality and living characteristics like eyes and possibly a mouth.

Below are some pictures of some steps along the building process.

 We have been using the Sparkfun audio breakout board that you can see in the middle of the screen. The purpose of the board is to play audio files with the click of a button.

Unfortunately for us it didn't work out quite that well. We tried every thing we could to troubleshoot the problem but we couldn't figure out how to get it working. We followed tutorials exactly and did every kind of testing we could from amperage, voltage, conductivity, etc and had no luck. The only odd thing we came across was that we were only getting 1.1 volts to the board and that value kept on gradually increasing and decreasing.

So next thing we did was purchase the Sparkfun MP3 shield to fit on the redboard. After some fiddling with drivers and libraries, we got the board to flash and also got it to play music. Our problem right now is getting enough power to the board to make the speaker loud enough.

Next step is to hook up a button and a 9v battery to the board and have the rock music played on button press. Once we have that, we will just put it inside our stuffed pet rock and we will be ready to rock out.