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"I am very emotionally affected by sound. Sounds are the inexplicable... There is a sound you hear in your head, it's your nerves, or your blood running." - Lou Reed, (1942-2013) was an American musician, singer, songwriter and poet.
Congratulations to balearicdynamics for The Pi Rotary. You are the winner of a $200 Shopping Cart!
Congratulations to fmilburn for Screaming LM386: An Audio Amplifier with PCB Art, BigG for Boogie Bones, and kedwards@swbell.net for Portable Ultrasonic Object Detector! You are the First Place winners of the $100 Shopping Cart!
Congratulations to Gough Lui for It’sa me, Oscilloscope! - Making Music with a 'scope? , cypresstwist for Audio project: Agony Box, robogary for "Amazing Bass" homebrew audio system for a Raspberry Pi Retro-gaming console , paj for Buzzomatic - electric ears , Sean_Miller for The specified item was not found., and vimarsh_ for SoundFi - Transmitting Data Using Sound (Ultrasonic Sound) ! You are the runners up and you win free swag!
The Acoustics competition gave you an opportunity to do projects around sound and could involve projects that involve infrasound, audible sound, ultrasound, amplifiers, piezoelectric material, spectrum analyzers, and more! Acoustics (from the Greek word akoustos which means "heard") is the science of how sound is produced, transmitted, controlled, and the effects of sound.
There were many outstanding contributions in this theme and the magic of sound, resonated with many of our community members. As the theme drew to close, the worldwide pandemic involving the COVID-19 brought fear and worry to many of us who turn to the community and projects to provide an enriching learning experience and add levity to life. One of the projects that really hit home for me, is not even listed on this announcement, a testament to the sheer number of great projects we had during the competition, was Relaxing sounds of nature by redcharly . redcharly , was gracious enough to volunteer to judge, scoring his top choices for projects, and giving helpful feedback. I've come to find out he's an IT teacher so scoring is something that comes naturally to him. His words in his post captured the spirit of this competition during these worrisome times:
"Hi, these are terrible days, in Italy we have been locked in the house for days to avoid the spread of Coronavirus.
"What's better than designing and building something with Arduino? I thought of creating a small circuit that, based on the values of temperature, humidity and brightness, can set 8 soundtracks for our day. For example, if it is hot and it is daytime it could be relaxing to hear crickets to dream of lying on the grass in the countryside, if instead it is dark and it is hot and humid it could be nice to listen to the frogs, etc.
"As sounds, we have that of a stream, that of rain, sea waves, etc. the only limit is our imagination. Songs that adapt to different situations could also be set, rock for summer evenings, blues for winter evenings, country music for summer afternoons, etc. I am having fun alternating music and sounds and, above all, I am spending long days at home doing something I love." - redcharly , Relaxing sounds of nature
Another thing that stuck out to me was the really awesome way that Gough Lui created sounds using bench top equipment from :
- It’sa me, Oscilloscope! - Making Music with a 'scope?
- It'sa me, Power Supply! - Making Music with a PSU?
- It'sa me, Power Supply! - Making Music with a PSU? Redux!
- It'sa me, Power Supply! (Part 3) - A PSU that Plays MIDI?
If you've ever wanted to hear a bench power supply unit play the theme song from Rocky now's your chance! Not a fan of Rocky? It also plays everything from Harold Faltermeyer - Axel F to Christina Aguleira and Counting Crows.
The Grand Prize winner of the competition goes to balearicdynamics for the The Pi Rotary. balearicdynamics reached out to me even before this competition began about doing a workshop series on doing weekend projects. We had chosen the Pi Rotary as the project to feature during the workshop, you'll get to see unseen footage from that build, and we're working on "homework" assignments to encourage members to blog about their upcycling projects. Close behind was balearicdynamics was fmilburn with Screaming LM386: An Audio Amplifier with PCB Art . fmilburn is a fan of what element14 presents is doing with #badass Women Makers and Engineers Contest and he created this special piece of Electronic Art which we're working with him on doing something cool with on the community in support of the contest. His Scream PCB art work was a clever entry in the Acoustics competitions and definitely earns the praise it received! Rounding out the first place finishers was Boogie Bones by BigG and Portable Ultrasonic Object Detector by kedwards@swbell.net
Without further Ado here are your winners.......
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The Winners | The Grand Prize
The Pi Rotary by balearicdynamics :
Community Member Scoring:
Engagement Score: 37 Likes, 1 Bookmark, 11 Comments, 13 Helpful, Total: 67
Grand Prize: 4 points, First Place: 2 points, Engagement Bonus: 1 point, Total Points: 6 Points
Pi Rotary is based on the upcycling of a rotary phone from the end of 60s' using a Raspberry Pi to create a Pi-rotary smartphone.
A part of the device that is excluded is the phone ring bell: controlling an old phone ring bell with digital low voltage signals may be more complex than expected as the bell rings working at a relatively high voltage. Together with the electrical issue, he had to find a way to create the space for the new components and using another class of audio messages – as we will see later – the ring bell results useless.
To provide audio features to the device balearicdynamics disassembled a cheap USB and Bluetooth portable amplifier with speakers. the device includes a 3.5 mm Jack audio input for wired connection, used to amplify the Raspberry Pi audio output. The amplifier is powered by a temporary switch button. After powering on, the default setting is Bluetooth mode; to switch to wired mode another temporary switch button should be pressed once. The power sequence need the button pressed for about five seconds (until the amplified emits a sound); the same when switching from Bluetooth mode for about half a second.
First Place Winners
Screaming LM386: An Audio Amplifier with PCB Art by fmilburn:
Community Member Scoring:
Engagement Score: 45 Likes, 24 Comments, 6 Helpful, Total: 75
Grand Prize: 2 points, First Place: 2 points, Engagement Bonus: 1 point, Total Points: 5 Points
The PCB art is based on the famous work by Edvard Munch called The Scream. The method used is based on the work of Andrew Sowa, with the main difference being fmilburn 'sworkflow uses Photoshop and converts the image to grey scale using the "magic wand" to isolate layers rather than a color conversion using Adobe Illustrator to create the bit map for KiCad as Andrew does. The modified layers are brought into KiCad and converted into a footprint. For additional information on the methods used see the first post here.
Boogie Bones by BigG:
Community Member Scoring:
Engagement Score: 58 Likes, 1 Bookmark, 14 Comments, 16 Helpful, Total: 89
Grand Prize: 2 points First Place: 1 points, Engagement Bonus: 2 points, Total Points: 5 Points
This toy was originally purchased as a funny/silly (you pick) Halloween toy, which played a somewhat annoying tune and the turntable turned to mimic a disc scratch when you pressed a button...
This months acoustics challenge was just the opportunity to bring a new lease of life to this skeleton disc-jockey. It also allowed for some learning through experimentation with Fast Fourier Transforms.
The parts/modules I used were as follows:
The project all hinges off software that interprets the spectrum analysis of a microphone audio signal. The Adafruit breakout board, which includes a 20-20KHz electret microphone and a Maxim MAX4466 op-amp for audio amplification to capture an audio signal. According to the product description, this breakout is best used for projects such as voice changers, audio recording/sampling, and audio-reactive projects that use FFT. The manual gain control allows amplification adjustment from 25x up to 125x.
Portable Ultrasonic Object Detector by kedwards@swbell.net
Community Member Scoring:
Engagement Score: 20 Likes, 2 Bookmarks, 7 Comments, 4 Helpful, Total: 33
Grand Prize: 2 points, First Place: 2 points, Total Points: 7 Points
kedwards@swbell.net has wanted to build an ultrasonic object detector ever since he saw a post on one. He's seen several projects on ultrasonic object detectors. However, all of the projects tethered the sensor to a PC. He wanted a more portable solution. So he designed an ultrasonic object detector that the user could place anywhere that had Wi-Fi connectivity. The ultrasonic object detector sends the sonar data to the PC via Wi-Fi. The PC then displays the data using a simulated sonar screen. To do this he mounted an HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor on a tilt-pan servo and attached the tilt-pan servo and ultrasonic sensor to the Arduino. The Arduino pans the environment while taking readings for the HC-SR04 senor for every degree the servo moves. The ESP8266 wifi module requests the sonar data from the Arduino. Finally, the Processing software module on the PC reads the sonar data sent by the wifi module and displays the data on the PC screen.
The HC-SR04 is an inexpensive ultrasonic distance sensor. Developers mainly use it to range the distance from an object. It is popular with DIY roboticists for collision avoidance in mobile robots. Other uses for ultrasonic distance sensors include speed and direction measurement, wireless charging, humidifiers, medical ultrasonography, and burglar alarms. It consists of a transmitter, receiver, and a crystal oscillator (Figure 2). The transmitter converts an electrical signal to ultrasonic waves, while the receiver converts the ultrasonic waves back to electrical signals. The purpose of the crystal oscillator is for timing operations. It works between 2cm to 400cm away with a resolution of 3mm. However, for the best results, range between 10cm and 250cm. Its measuring angle is 30o (15 degrees on either side of the sensor.) It uses approximately 15mA, and its operating voltage is 5 volts.
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| The Runners Up | Runners Up:
The following members received first place votes.
It’sa me, Oscilloscope! - Making Music with a 'scope? by Gough Lui
Community Member Scoring:
Engagement Score: 44 Likes, 5 Bookmarks, 10 Comments, 5 Helpful, Total: 64
First Place: 1 points, Engagement Bonus: 1 points Total Points: 2 Points
As we all know, sounds are just pressure waves in air. We can easily generate sounds from electrical waves by passing it to a transducer such as a speaker that vibrates the air in the same fashion. Digital music stores the shape of these electrical waves as samples – a digital number representing the amplitude of the wave at periodic intervals (which is often compressed to save storage space). Thus, if you store these samples rapidly enough and reproduce them rapidly enough, we can record and reproduce basically all sounds. To a human, this can be achieved with about ~40000 to 48000 samples per second.
Knowing this, the digital to analog converter in a sound card, music player or smartphone is just taking these samples and producing the analog voltage corresponding to them to reconstruct the analog waveform. In essence, it is an arbitrary waveform generator (subject to certain constraints, especially frequency response, accuracy and DC levels).
Where else can you find an arbitrary waveform generator? Well, on the bench ... and in the Rohde & Schwarz Oscilloscope Kit RTM3K-COM4 - Review, as an option. Are you thinking what Gough Lui is thinking?
"Amazing Bass" homebrew audio system for a Raspberry Pi Retro-gaming console by robogary:
Community Member Scoring:
Engagement Score: 8 Likes, 1 Comments, 1 Helpful, Total: 10
First Place: 2 points, Total Points: 3 Points
This custom portable Raspberry pi retro gaming console is different. It is a show piece for Raspberry Jams and Maker Faires. It is going to sonically annoy parents, wives, teachers, and those nasty smelly curmudgeons who won’t give your pudding until you eat your meat. People playing this version of the Raspberry Pi retro game console are not just going to play the game, they are going to FEEL the game. This Retro game console is going to be have AMAZING BASS. AMAZING BASS packs a thunderous punch in the gut for the gaming groans, explosions, launches, hits, and stomps. The retro game system is going to include a high powered audio amp, a subwoofer, and hand designed & built speaker enclosures AND it is going to be INEXPENSIVE ! It also needs to match and complement the retro gaming console.
The specified item was not found. by Sean_Miller
Community Member Scoring:
Engagement Score: 31 Likes, 1 Bookmark, 8 Comments, 5 Helpful, Total: 43
Grand Prize: 2 points, Total Points: 2 Points
This project is centered around acoustics and designed to protect our home. Sean_Miller wanted a system that doesn't have to wait until a door opens or a window is broken to trigger. He also doesn't want a laser beam that can be maneuvered around. The goal is to make a sensor system that will provide an orb of protection around his back porch impossible to infiltrate without triggering the alarm. Car parking sensors use ultrasound, which is an acoustic wave with a very high frequency, beyond human hearing above 20kHz. What is amazing about it is how "loud" it is. It sends out a inaudible scream at over 100dB - "louder" than a motorcycle without causing ear damage. With that short wave length, it has a pretty narrow beam, so it doesn't cause issues for designs like my orb around my porch since I can point it out of the way of fixtures. Also, since it is sound through air, it travels nominally at 340m/s. So, inexpensive devices can measure the time it takes to "bounce back". To hack the parking sensor, he simply needed to figure out how the brain box is communicating to the monitor. This project uses an Arduino MKR Zero, parking sensor kit, LM386, and a flower pot.
Audio project: Agony Box by cypresstwist:
Community Member Scoring:
Engagement Score: 34 Likes, 8 Comments, 13 Helpful, Total: 55
First Place: 1 points Total Points: 1 Points
This is just something to have disturbing fun with: the Agony Box. It uses an Adafruit Circuit Playground Express with some CircuitPython code and some freely available WAV files. The WAV files had to be converted to PCM 16-bit Mono and the volume needs to be turned down a bit. The open-source SoundConverter app in Ubuntu was used for the conversion. Disturbing – we know. The plan is to use analog buttons and a cheaper CircuitPython-capable device. This is just a quick hack.
Buzzomatic - electric ears by paj:
Community Member Scoring:
Engagement Score: 9 Likes, 4 Comments, 2 Helpful, Total: 15
First Place: 2 points Total Points: 2 Points
This is a great example of acoustics project used for accessibility. Hard of hearing people face all sorts of problems beyond the basic problems of communicating. One of these problems, which is potentially fatal, is not hearing sounds like someone blowing a horn as warning. paj is partially deaf in one ear and he understands the problem because he often hears things but can’t tell what direction it's come from. He started thinking about solutions to the direction problem and ended up with the idea of 2 microphones connected to vibration motors embedded into a baseball cap or hair band.
So hopefully if a loud noise occurred, the user would get a buzz on either side of the cap, depending upon which direction the noise was coming from. In order for this to be useful he figured it would have to fit into a baseball cap or Alice band so it needs to be a relatively small circuit. Also he wanted to keep it as simple as possible.
SoundFi - Transmitting Data Using Sound (Ultrasonic Sound) by vimarsh_
Community Member Scoring:
Engagement Score: 10 Likes, 2 Bookmarks, 1 Comments Total: 13
First Place: 1 points Total Points: 1 Points
The idea was simple, to transmit data using sound waves. But, not only simple text I wanted to create a device that can demonstrate how we can use sound to take readings in water bodies (oceans) and send it to surface stations. What I wanted to do was simple. Collect data from BME 280 sensor(measures temperature, humidity and air pressure), send it via sound to a receiver, The receiver takes the data, splits it and sends it to Cloud. He's using Blynk service. It is a very easy to use service to send data and has a simple to use app.
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