Exploding Kittens Soundboard

13 May 2018

Between the Pi-Top - A Raspberry Pi Laptop RoadTest and the Bluetooth Unleashed Design Challenge I had some difficulties finding time to make a proper Arduino project. On the other hand, my Hero board for the design challenge is an Arduino compatible board with Bluetooth capabilities, so that must count for something ?

Here's a very simple project I made a while back, using the Bare Conductive Touch Board Bare Conductive Touch Board: an Exploding Kittens Soundboard. Don't worry, I didn't really make any kittens explode ... Exploding Kittens is a card game I play frequently, which I find to be a lot of fun.

There's no coding involved in this particular project, as the default sketch on the TouchBoard takes care of all the needed functionality.

Build

I started off by picking en element from the game and reproducing it physically. The obvious choice, is one of the kittens on an explosion card.

Based on the card, I drew the kitten on a piece of wood and cut it out using the jigsaw. After a bit of sanding, I applied grey paint to the front and when dry, applied the details using black. Taking into consideration the fact that I’m not a woodworker and that I suck at drawing, the result is not that bad!

To have the kitten be able to stand up straight, I added a hinge and a small piece of wood.

Electronics

The electronics are simple. The Touch Board (originally launched via Kickstarter) is an Arduino compatible board, offering capacitive touch sensing and mp3 play out, making it perfect for this project. Using conductive paint, four pads were created, each capable of triggering a different sound effect. The board supports up to twelve touch points, should you want or need even more sound effects. Copper tape connects the pads to the Touch Board. No programming required, as explained earlier!

Even through the wood (18mm), hovering your hand in front of the pad, triggers the sensor and plays the sound effect.

The Touch Board is powered using a LiPo battery, which can be charged via the board when connected via USB. There is also a handy on/off switch available onboard.

Finally, the speaker I used is a rechargeable, powered speaker connected to the Touch Board using the stereo jack. Alternatively, a small speaker and amplifier breakout board could be used.