Recently I have been having a hard time watching my television. There are a lot of people on the TV lately who like to make up things and tell lies or at least bend the truth around so that one can not tell which end of the horse to kiss. These alternate facts as they have come to be called usually get me up out of my chair, hollering as loud as I can with my fractured voice, and explaining to my wife who usually isn't paying attention to me or the TV, what the latest conspiracy theory is. I have decided that this is not the best way for me to react to what is being said so to save my blood pressure I have asked a couple friends of mine to sit with me and give me their opinions of the truth of what I am being told. I am sure you have already met them somewhere along the way.
I would usually at this point show you how I built my solution to this problem but today I am going to show you the end result and then go back and explain how I put it together. Just as the people on the TV put forth their opinions, in this video I am going to ask Stuart for his opinion on something Bob did.
Now that you can see the finished product you will be able to imagine me sitting in front of the TV next week using my friends Bob and Stewart to help me fact check what is being said. This should relieve a lot of shouting and stress in my life.
The heart of the Lie Detector is a small circuit that I have used many times in the past and just recently on my Electronic Art project "The Thinker". It is available on EBay for about $3 plus shipping.
This circuit is powered with 3V to 5.5V and allows one to record up to 10 seconds of audio which can then be played back through the speaker as many times as needed. The sound reproduction is really fairly good but it is necessary to make some sort of a speaker enclosure otherwise a lot of fidelity is lost.
Here are the rest of the parts that I needed to make the Lie Detector.
Here we have a big medicine bottle, a 18650 battery in a single holder, and a handpiece from an X-Ray exposure cord. The Exposure cord is just a momentary push button switch in a handle that was originally used to take dental x-rays. This is what the dentist's assistant takes outside the room to avoid the ionizing radiation she is about to shoot through your mouth. From past experience I know that the medicine bottle makes an excellent speaker enclosure. The bottle is also big enough to hold the 18650 Li-ion battery and holder as well. There wasn't anything to the electronics on this project as the voice module came fully assembled and there was a header on the board where I could make the needed connections using female bread board jumpers. Here are some pictures of the finished project.
Now all that is left for me to do is to settle into my comfy couch, turn on my TV Monday night, take the exposure switch in hand, and see how many 18650 batteries it will take to get me through the week.
John
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