Noj> A friend wants me build a simple sounding gadget, but I'm not sure how Noj> to proceed. Basically an outdoor mike, speaker, and pressure switch Noj> under a mat in/in front of art display, probably with cords going back Noj> to a linux box indoors. When you step on the mat, it plays the last 21 Noj> seconds of messages, and then does an audio prompt to leave a 7 second Noj> message.
Randal> Sounds like a perfect thing for an Arduino box. Listen to Randal> http://twit.tv/floss61 for our interview with the developers. Thanks for reminding me of that show, I heard it but should review it. Was left with the impression that it was good at hooking to sensors and turning things on and off, but could it record and playback audio on it's own? Anyway, a bit overkill if I only need one switch detected, but I would like to get an Arduino, seems to greatly expand the amount of low-budget projects I could try. In any case, the timeframe for doing this just changed from 'about a month' to 'next week', so I'm going to just get a bunch of greeting card modules for about $3 each (bigdawgspromo.com), arrange them in a circle, put a wheel with openings in it as an overlay so that only one record button is exposed at a time, while all play buttons EXCEPT that one are exposed. The directions on the wheel would be something like 'play as many of the preceeding messages as you like, then record your response and advance the wheel one mark clockwise'. Since this solution doesn't keep any record of the messages except the last message left in each physical module, I'm thinking an extra mike and switch running via cat5 to the house that records mp3 on the linux box only while a certain key is held down, 'push to talk' style. So PLUG question: what's a good linux app that can be made to record only while a key is being held down? - Noj _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
