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[on:]

Hi all,

We need all your bright brains, because we're not nearly smart enough to figure this out on our own. We're designing a toy prototype for a class, and we need help coming up with a plan of attack.

Here's the objective. We'll have 50 blocks, each with a different word written on it. Each block will have a button that when pressed will speak the word. (The sound, we imagine, will come through a wave shield attached to a speaker.) Users can then arrange the blocks in a row to create sentence. Press the button on each block in the sentence and you can hear the whole sentence read. Pretty straight forward.

Here are our questions.

• How do we wirelessly connect all the blocks to the wave shield? Is there an inexpensive way (less than $10/block) of having all the blocks send a unique signal to the arduino/waves shield when a button is pressed within a range of about a meter? We've looked into RFID tags but we worry that the range is too limited. Xbee is too expensive.
• Ideally, a user could "download" a sentence to a special sentence block. In other words, when a sentence was formed, a user could connect the special sentence block to the string of blocks and that string of words would be somehow stored in the sentence block. Any freaking way?

Really, truly, thank you for your help. We appreciate all we can get.

[Reply #1 on:]

Similar discussion here

[Reply #2 on:]

The cheapest form of "wireless" is infrared.  You would need a clear line-of-sight between the sender and receiver.

[Reply #3 on:]

You could have a cheap  HT12E chip in each block, each with its own address and data  soldered pattern, diving a cheapy RF Tx module.

Someone wrote a library to decode the Holtek codes, ( or you could use 4 HT12D decoder chips ) and you could then queue the block number order, and play the audio clips from an SD card.

I have done this and it works ( but I only had 16 " blocks" )

[Reply #4 on:]

Yes, we posted once before, but our objectives have changed. We're wondering now if we can do away with the base station entirely and have the blocks communicating entirely wirelessly.

[Reply #5 on:]

We're wondering now if we can do away with the base station entirely and have the blocks communicating entirely wirelessly.

If you do away with the base station, what do the blocks wirelessly communicate with?

You can eliminate the base station and the wireless by putting a "musical greeting card" chip and speaker in each block.  Record the sound on the chip and have it play when the button is pressed.  This supplier sells them for $0.50 each and has a minimum order of only 50:  http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/548080936/greeting_card_music_chip.html

[Reply #6 on:]

You could record the word through a recording module available at Radio Shack, and transmit this wirelessly through wifi with an Ethernet shield or a WiFi shield. The cheapest way to do it is through infrared as johnwasser said.

[Reply #7 on:]

You can eliminate the base station and the wireless by putting a "musical greeting card" chip and speaker in each block.  Record the sound on the chip and have it play when the button is pressed.  This supplier sells them for $0.50 each and has a minimum order of only 50:  http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/548080936/greeting_card_music_chip.html

This sounds like by far the simplest, cheapest and easiest approach, and will probably also be more effective in use than an electronic solution that triggers a shared speaker.