First, we soldered the Adafruit FX Sound Board to use it to store the music file. We then solder the speaker component. We then set up the breadboard as follows:
As you see, our full circuit’s components consist of:
We first made a prototype of using the button as an input that activate the speaker to play a test file music. The biggest challenge that we had was figuring out how to make the speaker sound. Even though we followed the product instruction of importing the file to the Arduino FX Sound, we learn that our FX board does not have an amplifier, which is a crucial component to make the sound.
Once we were able to test the speaker successfully and understand all the foundational details, we moved on to implement our real circuit. For our music, Jo and I chose the sound effects that we think celebrate the end of the Rube Goldberg chain. We used the Zoom Recorder to record a line “We connected, we conquered. We Rube’d the Goldberg” followed by an energetic house music. We edit the music using Adobe Audition.
Little did we know, our second challenge arose when the speaker refused to sound out our hardworking remix! Despite countless attempts to import the music file in different file sizes and bitrates, we had to give up and instead used one of the sound files that did not go through Adobe Audition. It was a bummer to make that decision, but we're glad that the FX board accepted our last sound file at the end.
In the final step, we replaced the button with the light sensor. We changed our code in the IDE to activate the speaker when the brightness level measured by the light sensor reaches a specific value. We are able to successfully test our whole circuit, and we can’t wait to bring our Rube Goldberg as the ending sequence to the class!
