I've been working this season on expanding my use of the Picaxe chip for controllers to use in my haunt. With hpropman coming up the concept and the help of Fritz42_male, we've come up with an inexpensive and easy to build controller utilizing the entry level Picaxe 08 to take an audio input and have it drive a servo for a talking skull. Cowlacious makes a great off the shelf unit, but I wanted to see if we could make one cheaper and with the ability to program it to better fit our needs. The basic board costs around $15 in parts if you order in quantity once you have the Picaxe download cable which runs about $20. The code for the board is very simple and you can just cut and paste it into the free editor.
So here is the basic board. I'll be modifying it yet to utilize the other 2 outputs in order to have it triggered by a PIR and to use one of the 300 second audio boards from Electronics123.
Somewhat off-topic, but does anyone have the dimensions of the Tenda board that halstaff linked to? The web-site that I ordered from indicates that it is 21 mm wide. I don't believe that, because an SD card by itself is 24 mm.
Pshort has come through again and put together a schematic with the current modifications. My thanks to him for continually updating the schematic when I decide to make improvements. His work is greatly appreciated.
The mp3 player from mdfly just arrived in the mail, surprisingly quick. Now to start playing with it... I just wish that the pins were at right angles to the board rather than parallel to it.
A few observations on that Tenda serial controller...
1) It appears to have a capacitor on its output. No particular surprise here...
2) The maximum output voltage appears to be about 600 mV peak-to-peak. This is based on playing an mp3 file containing a fairly large amplitude tone, chosen so that it isn't clipped when played on my FreeBSD-based netbook.
Prices are in US$ but please note that I don't sell them. Tenda will sell small amounts at the sample price and will happily quote you including postage.
Has anyone looked into how long it takes before the player responds to serial input data after power is applied? The one that I have seems to require somewhat more than 600 ms.
I've finally got the Tenda boards to play nice with the servos for my talking skulls. Best single piece of advice I can give is to use a separate power source for the Tenda boards. After many frustrating hours spent, it was found that this was the biggest cause of problems we thought were due to programming.
Seperate power supply? Do tell. I want to use a computer power supply to run my prop, using the 5V rail to power the picaxe, servos and tenda. Am I asking too much of it?
I received the 5V power supply to run the wiper motor for the Kiwi controller board for the seance room and it works perfectly. All the components are happy and working together now.
The Kiwi board controls the entire scene. When the PIR is triggered, it starts a wiper motor on the rocking chair, starts the moving books, turns on the LED lights on both the books and the rocking chair, triggers the Tenda board to start and runs the jaw servo on the skeleton. After the skeleton says his piece, the audio, the rocking chair and its light stop. A second servo pushes down on the DVD remote and starts the Madame Leota projection. After it finishes, the moving books and its lights go off and the system waits for 60 seconds before it can be retriggered.
Everything including the PIR, Tenda board, Kiwi board, components, speakers and power supplies came to around $80 with the 5A power supplies costing $30 alone. I have to order some off Ebay to cut down that cost.
I'm posting it here instead of in its own thread as the few people interested seem to be following this thread.
Using a computer power supply is certainly something I'm thinking of trying.
I have a 12V power supply coming into the Kiwi board with one rail running the 12V components except the wiper motor which has a separate 5V power supply. The Kiwi board has a 5V regulator to get the power for the Picaxe, PIR, LED eyes and the 2 servos. I tried running the wiper motor from the Kiwi board power but it was too big a load.
The audio/servo board with the Tenda player requires a separate power supply to eliminate interference.
I've been reading up on the use of decoupling (bypass) capacitors and I think your trouble could be alleviated by putting a lot more decoupling on both boards. It's certainly worth a try.
Try a combo of 47nF Ceramic and 47uF/10V across the power lines as close to the chips as possible - a pair per chip and another pair on the power lines by the Tenda board
If it works then you can run on 1 5V supply for both boards.
I'm also about to try an iTouch based scope (uses a microphone link and a 1x /10x probe). Also got a USB soundcard on order to try a PC based scope that uses the mic input (I can fry a USB soundcard and not worry - they are less than $5 delivered)
yes you can use the computer power supply to power the board. Fritz please let us know how that USB scope works out for you I was looking at one myself.
Will it be able to power all the components? Picaxe, Pololu micro maestro,Tenda, 3 vent motors and 5-6 servos. I might be asking a lot of the 5V rail.
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