Just wanted to give the heads up that I am brand new to Arduino so this question may actually be easily found somewhere else so I apologizes in advance, I try not to be “that guy”.
Ultimately I want my first prototype to pick up on a certain threshold of noise and then set off an alarm if tripped. My girlfriend has type-1 diabetes and has a small device attached to her that constantly monitors her blood sugar. When her blood sugar goes out of safe range an alarm goes off on a device she keeps in her pocket or by the bed at night. Problem is that the alarm is only about 3 seconds long and only goes off every 5 minutes, it is also not very loud there for she sleeps through it. My idea is to have a device that uses a piezo as an audio sensor that will sense the audio of the alarm on the existing unit and then set off an alarm on the new gadget I'm building that will be audible until shut off manually.
As stated I am a beginner so I'm tinkering around with portions of this project before actually doing it as a whole. My first concern is to figure out the audio sensor. From what I have picked up on so far the analog pins on the arduino can report back a value between 0-1023. I have tinkered around using the piezo as a knock sensor and such but I was wondering if there is a program that can just report back what value between 0-1023 it is reading from the piezo in rearguard to the audio it is picking up. My thought being is using the serial monitor to read back a live view on what the arduino is reading through the piezo. Even though this wont be used in the final project I think it would be a good learning tool to see how exactly the sensor is affected by different things.
Also from my research I think that the value of the resister used with the piezo effects how sensitive the piezo is to audio. (I may very well be wrong on this but I think thats what I read) is there a device such as a turn knob that could be used to adjust the sensitivity of the piezo on the fly?
Sorry for the long post, like I said I'm brand new so all input it helpful, thanks. Also any tips on another way to go about my final project are appreciated as well.