Please help me with my halloween costume! "Blinking eyes to music"

Other Hardware LEDs and Multiplexing
1

Hi guys!

I'm pretty new to the arduino scene but I have an idea for halloween that I need help with. I want to go as Shufflebot from the LMFAO videos

but I need help with the eyes. I want to have red LED's that blink to the music. I figured I could use the arduino with a li-po battery and keep it all in the head, use a microphone (which one?) to pick up the music and have the LED's flash in sync with the music.

The problem is I don't know where to start :smiley: Or how I should wire the thing and program the arduino.

Could you guys please help me?

2

Start with google (research part of the project):
http://www.google.ca/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=arduino+beat+detector&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&channel=suggest
Then move to concept design part, searching for components, boards, leds etc.
Assembly, testing, debugging will follow next.
You can ask more specific question at any stage.

3

Go to one of the supply houses (Adafruit, Sparkfun, Yourduino, etc) and buy a sound sensor module. You don't have time to goof around building and amplifier and coupling it to mic, etc. Just buy a premade.

You supply it with 5v and gnd, and it returns the favor with a signal that you can feed into an analog input on the Arduino.

You are going to want to use a switching transistor (2n2222 or 2n3904 is a cheap one) with a base resistor, connected to a digital output.. with NPN transistors, you will be "switching the ground" rather than "switching the power".

From there, it's just "on if volume from mic is above a certain value" in terms of code.

Now get to it, overnight shipping costs a fortune.