Sound Detection for Boe-Bot?

b_aero_eng

All

Hi, I'm new to boe-bot and basic stamp but not to mechatronics.· I plan to use boe-bot as an educational demo to raise enthusiasm for engineering and embedded systems for some school kids.··I bought the USB boe-bot kit and assembled.· As I have many I/O pins left over after building the circuits for the sensors that came with the kit I'm thinking it would be good to extend the functionality a bit to have boe-bot respond to sounds.· A specific example of what I have in mind is a handclap waking up boe-bot while in the hiding state in an application such as cockroach emulation.· I was very surprised to find the Parallax website devoid of any circuitry dealing with anything in the audible range.· I am an experienced engineer and am confident that I can improvise something that will satisfy this application but at the same time I don't want to reivnent any wheels if there is already a commercially available solution.· For the cockroach application a pulse/threshold detector should be sufficient...and maybe a comparator if 2 detectors were to be used to determine the initial direction the cockroach should run when it hears the clap.

Does anyone know of a commercial product that does audio detection or has anyone already gone this direction?· Any comments would be much appreciated.

Thanks
Bruce

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Mike Green

There are many sample circuits for this sort of thing that can be found with a simple internet search. Here's one example: www.reconnsworld.com/audio_electretamp.html. The output is a logic signal that can be connected to a Stamp I/O pin. All the parts should be able to be found at a RadioShack store.

b_aero_eng

Thanks Mike, that one looks pretty easy to implement.· Might even have some of the components laying around.· I may even be able to do comparison of 2 of these circuits using the stamp software.· I'll post back on this after I have had some time to implement and test.

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