microcontrollers

[spacebug]

There's a little interactive art project I want to make- I want to take an existing phone, and have each of the number keys trigger a sample (or mp3, or whatever, quality isn't super important) through the receiver's speaker. If possible, I think it'd also be fun to put a proximity sensor on the ringer so that it rings when someone approaches it. I know this should be do-able with a microcontroller, but I have no experience with them and very little programming experience (though I'm working my way through MAX/MSP, which, while not a true programming language, can communicate with ardunios.)

Any advice or online resources from you Makers?

Comments

[buckminster.livejournal.com]

arduino is really the way to go for most micro applications.
The Atmel it's based on is a powerful little chip, and the arduino is a friendly interface for programming it.

You can get add-on components to do sound. Like, combine this with some flash memory and you can play mp3's http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=8125

But a little easier: Find those things they put inside recordable greeting cards or other toys. like this: http://www.gmkmg.com/toy_product/htm/sound_chip_modules.htm
If you record your sounds on those, you can simply trigger them with one of the arduino pins.

At some point the limiting factor is going to be the number of pins on the micro- if you need one per key you'll run out fast. Cubloc.com makes fairly easy to use boards with lots of pins, which like arduino are based on Atmel and programed in basic. More expensive.

However, more elegant would be to use a parallel to serial shift register chip to read those pins.

[buckminster.livejournal.com]

PS. Gut an old 1970's phone, you should have enough room inside. I'm assuming you want this to be portable with no wires running to hidden electronics...

Although if you can have a wire going back to a laptop....
Hook a shift register up to the buttions of the phone and use that to send serial info back to a laptop running max/msp. Then MAX/MSP sends sound back to the receiver. You'll probably want to use an ethernet cord so that you have enough wires.

Oh, and for the motion sensor- these $8 gizmos are great for answering the question "has anything moved in the last few seconds", which should be enought for this project http://parallax.com/Store/Sensors/ObjectDetection/tabid/176/CategoryID/51/List/0/Level/a/ProductID/83/Default.aspx