I'm an occasional Arduino dabbler with limited electronics experience. So please be gentle
I'm looking at a project which plays a recording of my wife when the device detects our dogs barking. The hope being that it may calm them down when we are not around.
I think its fairly simple but wondered if someone could advise the best approach - bearing in mind I'd be more effective with breakout boards etc. than raw components.
I've been looking at the Adafruit Wave Shield and the Music Maker but wondered if they might be more sophisticated than needed. And I've also seen the Sparkfun sound detector, but again would an electret mic breakout be adequate?
One of the dogs sometimes gets stressed when she isn't around and howls. That then brings the other two to bark. Can happen when we go upstairs to bed, or when we go out in the evening (not popular with the neighbours).
So my thinking is if a noise activates a recording of her voice it might make them think she is in the next room which does generally calm them down. Ideally I would be to record a small number of tracks that play randomly when the noise level reaches a certain point.
So can anyone please advise whether the modules/shields I've identified from my research will do what I want or indeed if there is a simpler approach.
I realise there may well be other ways to achieve my end goal but I want to do it as an Arduino project as part of learning more about it.
So in essence I want to be able to do the following.
Monitor ambient noise levels
If there is a significant increase (dog bark/howl) trigger an audio player (sensitivity adjustment required)
Audio player to contain minimum one, but ideally a few, recordings of my wife saying phrases (wav/mp3?)
Audio player to play the clips randomly or possibly in a set sequence to allow escalation of the sternness of the audio
Not essential, but some way of indicating that it has gone off might be helpful
