Ron Guest

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Mission Arduino: Accomplished

Those who follow me on Twitter or FaceBook know I decided to dive into the world of Arduino recently. After a bit of studying, ordering parts, and making a few runs to RadioShack I’ve completed the prototype build of my first project. The goal is to create a multi-purpose motion detector. The key components of this build are the Arduino microcontroller, a Parallax passive infrared sensor, and a Adafruit Audio (WAV) shield with a SD card for audio storage. Arduino processors have very little memory so the SD card is essential to play sounds of any complexity or duration.

My current software manages the Infrared sensor, lights a LED when motion is detected and also plays a tone on a piezo device. The Audio shield has pretty low level hardware so the software to manipulate it is relatively complex and will take a little time to integrate. I built the Audio shield last night and tonight I integrated it with the PIR, LED and piezo and tweaked the software that senses motion and manipulates the LED and piezo. My next step will be to add the code needed to play audio from the SD card through a speaker. I suspect once I have that software mod working I will have to design more amplification than the Audio shield provides.

As far as applications for this project: well, you’ll have to wait a bit to hear about that. I’m planning to create a few postings on the Arduino resources I’ve found most useful. The photo below shows the current build with the Audio shield stacked on top of the Arduino Duo with a small breadboard for the misc parts.

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