I guess I better explain all this a bit better.
The project isnt exactly defined yet, I am building this on a suck and see basis, the fixed point I know are that there are two speakers that I will be connecting to, one is 8Ohm one is 16. For now the out put is the line out or the headphone socket of my laptop sound card, this will change to a DAC on a micro.
At my school we have a kind of school within a school that is for handicapped children, some are pretty bad some are pretty much like me just not as good looking
. The school got a grant or some money thrown at them for a sensory room, they built it and to be honest it is £60,000 of junk! Most of the kids are frightened of it, I know this because one day a week I am taught there for what is called 'social skills'
they still think they can make me like people and crowded places
! They are convinced that I can become comfortable around groups of people
, I go because there is a class of mentally handicapped kids next to my class and I get to go sit in there for a couple of hours each week.
One of the kids lives near me and has been to my house for the day, he got really excited (I assume it was excitement) with the 555 timer toy gun I did for the other kid at Christmas time, I still had the basic circuit I started with on a strip board and messed about with it when this other kid (Gary his name is) was here, normally he sits in his chair dribbles a bit and makes a few noises but not much else, I actually like him alot because he just sits and watches me and dosnt want to (cant anyway) talk, but mainly I get the feeling even if he could talk he wouldnt want to, so this is a perfect friend!
I hooked up one of the 3x3x3 cubes I had to the mic and gary messed with the buttons on the strip board, some of the sounds and flashing made him animated and smiley.
Anyway I have some advanced ARM chips with built in codecs and a couple of DACS etc, I have been playing around with the speek codex but instead of making it sound like a voice I have fed it the output from one of those colour reading chips, I call it listening to colour as I cant think what else it is, I have some RGB Leds that are connected to a simple circuit that is similar to a basic sound to light thing, it has a couple of mics and some filters. The idea is when I play music the Leds glow and flash different colours, this is picked up by the colour chip and passes it to the speek codec the output from that will goto the speakers.
I have no idea why (yet) but it seems the light and noise made by it all is pleasing to Gary (I went to his house with a very basic set up but no amplifier) he went nuts!!! seemed to love it, now he is way up the scale of disabled compared to alot of the kids in that class, so I am using him as my bench mark, he smiles its a go, he turns away and drifts it's crap.
So my plan is to build something that will hook into the water bubble tubes they have in the class, they are large clear cylinders filled with water and a few red and blue leds around the top, it bubbles air into the water and you get a pretty column of water
well in theory you do, in reality everyone ignores them as they are boring. But they do have unused speakers in them and enough room to fit some RGB leds into the top
.
So I am trying to build a 'SOMETHING' for these kids, I know a bit about the water tubes because each week I volunteer to clean them when I am over that side for the day
it helps stop me getting bored and would give me the chance to 'fit some extra's', no one will really notice what I am upto until I am finished that I am sure of.