I was wondering if anyone could help me out with some questions about the ardunio's capabilities. I am working on a project involving the possible translation and relationships between sound and light. I am working with several different electronic 'event's' involving sound vibrations and light movement. I am wondering how arduino could help in controlling the different systems using simple lamps and sound systems. Could arduino control when electronics of high voltage could turn on or off and up to how many? What would I need?
I was also wondering how I could find a way to use arduino as a pitch reader and translating that into different corresponding light colors. Is there a way to do this?
For controling high voltage devices there are serveral ways Arduino could do that, the most common way is probably to use Arduino to drive a transistor that i turn drives a relay that can turn on / of high voltage loads.
Arduino has 14 digital outs that can do that, but this can easily be expanded to "many" with for instance 595 shift registers.
Pitch reading is more complicated, but people working with analog synths frequently used pitch to voltage converters. Arduino has 6 anlog inputs that can read a voltage in the 0 - 5V range and turn the reading into a number in the 0 - 1024 range (this is called analog to digital conversion with 10 bit resolution). So one (of possibly serveral) ways to do it isto convert your pitch to a voltage with some external device.