So I've got a project right now that I'm building for my garden where 8 different lights are triggered at random to slowly fade on and back off. Ive already got that bit worked out, but with that I would like to trigger a tone to swell up and down in volume from a speaker installed at each of the 8 stations. The idea is to have a randomly generated melody eminating from the garden.
I have a feeling directly synthesizing the tones won't be as effective as just playing pre-recorded .wav files, but I could be mistaken. I just think I'll have more control over the sound if I go this route. You could see how a project like this could go from soothing to highly irritating with the wrong choice of sounds.
It seems like this shield would work OK.
My main concern though is that this won't be able to play multiple audio files at the same time. With 8 lights triggering at random on a 3 to 5 minute timer, each taking about 30 seconds to a minute to cycle, there are usually about 4 lights doing their thing at any given time, sometimes more less.
Am I on the right track with my choice in hardware here? I also don't know how I'll hook it all up... 8 lights, 8 speakers, an audio shield of some kind, and probably a few buttons to control the thing. I'm running a deficit on pins. Will I need some other device to get it all talking to the arduino? After writing that all out it seems a bigger project that I had thought...
My main concern though is that this won't be able to play multiple audio files at the same time
True it won't, it is all the arduino can do to keep up with the demands for one sample. Also you can't open more than one file at once with a SD card.
You would have to have one arduino and wave shield per sound, or get your PC to generate the sound.
You could see how a project like this could go from soothing to highly irritating with the wrong choice of sounds.
Well I could see how it could go from highly irritating to slightly less irritating.
Grumpy_Mike:
Well I could see how it could go from highly irritating to slightly less irritating.
Hah! All notes would be from the same scale. You will get a bit of occasional dissonance from the two half step intervals, but there will be enough pleasant harmonies from the rest of the notes that it will make the a natural tension and release.
Either way it is a bit of a novelty, so I plan on having a mute.
Is there a way around getting 8 separate wave shields? Are there any shields on the market that can handle multiple samples/outputs?
This is a midi device with 31sound polyphony. Maybe this would be a better option?
I'm looking around some more and it seems the MIDI shield outputs to a headphone jack, so there wouldn't be any way to split it off to 8 individual speakers. I'm thinking Mike is right. That brings the cost up form $20 to about $160. Not terrible, but now my issue of lack of inputs on the arduino has been made worse.
Is this looking like one Uno will do the trick, or am I now using 8 Unos as well? This is my first stab at an Arduino project, so pardon my inexperience. If anyone sees a better approach than I'm taking I would appreciate the input.
There is a six voice solution - simple tones, but capable of polyphonic playback as well. You would have to write a simple note sequencer but you could also experiment with synthesizer tones as well using the GinSing shield.