YouTuber Alastair Aitchison, of Playful Expertise, has proven off a brand new mission designed to be a success at a marriage, birthday, bar mitzvah, or different celebratory gathering: a transformed classic phone that acts as an audio-based guestbook.
“I believe loads of Arduino tasks have an excessive amount of emphasis on the ‘visible’ facet of issues — LEDs, NeoPixels, LCD shows, and so forth., and so forth.,” Aitchison explains of the inspiration behind his newest creation, “and there appears to be comparatively a lot much less audio tasks. So, this is a tutorial I simply made on the best way to create an ‘Audio Guestbook’ from an previous phone.”
The mission is pushed by a Teensy 4.0 microcontroller board, linked to an Audio Protect add-on and with a microSD card for storage. The {hardware} itself is then housed within the physique of a classic phone, utilizing the handset as speaker and microphone.
When a visitor lifts the handset, a pre-recorded message is loaded from the microSD card and performed via the speaker; as soon as playback has completed, the construct swaps into recording mode and captures the microphone enter as a 16-bit 44.1kHz WAV file. Every recording is incrementally numbered — that means that, by the top of the gathering, the microSD must be full of particular person messages of well-wishing.
The {hardware} is hidden inside, and makes use of elements from, an previous rotary phone. (?: Playful Expertise)
“I am conscious of a few firms that provide these form of merchandise — ‘After the Tone,’ ‘FêteFone,’ ‘Life on Document,’ ‘On the Beep,’ and others,” Aitchison admits, “however they sometimes price ~$400 to rent the tools, after which extra expenses to acquire copies of the audio recordsdata afterwards! The guestbook I’ve constructed price about £30 [around $38] to make.”
The total information, together with hyperlinks to all required {hardware} and software program, is now out there on the Playful Expertise YouTube channel.
