Microphone for simple project

Hi @all!

I have a small project with some friends with my arduino. We are software engineers so we are ok with coding for arduino, however, we have some problems deciding about the hardware part.

We want to be able to capture the volume on a room, and measure the sound produced when people are clapping. The more the people claps, the better. We transfer the "amount" of clapping to the computer and do some stuff.

Se basically we are looking for a microphone that could be adapted to arduino, and detect the "clapping" amount on a room :slight_smile: any help for that?

Most microphones put out a very veak signal, so you need some kind of amplification. Try reading this thread :

http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1202056662/15

Also Tom Igoes book Physical computing has a circuit for amplifying the signal from a mic. to a level where it can be read with a microprocessor (not Arduino in this book, but the circuit will be good with Arduino as well)