All That and a Bag of Chips - The Talking Gift Box

The Talking Gift Box

 

Items Needed for this project:

1. Gift Box - I used the box that the necklace I purchased came in. 
2. 5x7 cm prototype board
3.  64M bit MP3 Voice Module Serial SPI FLASH SSOP24 Amplifier MINI USB for Arduino
4. (4) momentary switches
5. 1uF Capacitor
6. 10uF Capacitor
7. 7805 Voltage Regulator
8. 220 Ohm Resistor
9. 4 pin header
10. 5mm LED and LED holder
11. Speaker with 4 pin female header
12. On/Off Switch

 The 7805 Voltage Regulator was scavenged from scrap parts we had in the club's shop

The piece of aluminum it is attached to made a great heat sink and wire organizer. 

This is the schematic I found to regulate the 9V battery down to 5V to power the MP3 Module

  Here is a great video that shows how the MP3 Module works:

A simple way to add MP3 playback to your next project

The maker of the video I mentioned above was nice enough to include the
instruction manual in his support files. This image of the pinout is from that PDF
This is a link to go to his support page

 I installed the buttons on the bottom of the prototype board so that they

can stick out of the top of the box and all the components can have room inside the box

 Finished all the wiring.

 I added Velcro to the bottom of the board to allow removal if I wanted to upload different sounds

 Finished the lid. The LED lights up to let you know when the circuit is on.

I got my son to add the sound effects.  He says "Ho Ho Ho" on the Santa Button

"Merry Christmas" on the Christmas Wreath button, "I Love You Mommy" on the Heart

button and "Bonsai!" on the Karate Kid button.

 I hid the speaker and 9V battery under the necklace

 All connected.

 See it in action.

All That and a Bag of Chips - The CHIPSmas Wreath

The Christmas Light Circuit

 

My original plan was to have two of these circuits running to add to the randomness of the lights.

 The Schematic of the Christmas Light Circuit

 Went for some festive colored wire and weaved it through some of the prototype

board for more of a decorative look

 Finished wiring the prototype board

 Prepping the RAM chips

The Heat gun made short work of the glue on those labels.

I drilled holes in 20 chips and inserted 5mm LED holders

I used small gauge wire to solder to the LEDs for easy wiring.

Foam core base

 Once I got the RAM into place I glued each one down to the foam core with hot glue.

I used more foam core for the back of the wreath to protect the wiring.

 

 Inserting and Gluing the LEDs in the RAM chips

 I made a small hole under the RAM to run the LED wire from the front to the back of the wreath.

 I ran 18 Gauge solid wire around the wreath for a ground. At each place I needed to attach an LED to ground I just whittled the protective coating off ground wire, twisted the LED wire around the exposed part and then soldered for extra strength.

Hard Drive arms make a great Christmas Star.

 

 Gluing down the hard drive stepper motors and Hard Drive star as ornaments. 

The CHIPSmas Wreath and all its glory.  

Watch the full video here

Thanks for stopping by our blog.

~Kilo (All That and a Bag of Chips)

Getting Started in Electronics - Episode 2 - Wire

 

This is episode 2 in our Getting Started in Electronics series. In this episode we cover some of the types of wire available.  When Enigmatic Electronics got started we were fortunate enough that one of our members had a kit of jumper wires made specifically for breadboards which helped a lot when building some of our circuits.  We were also fortunate enough that one of our members had been saving scrap wire for a while.  The first project we made using scrap wire was The Game Show Buzzer, and it took a LOT of wire.

We had money in the buttons and the relays, but most that wire was scrap.  Now that's what we call upcycling!

Getting Started in Electronics - Episode 1 - Scavenging for Parts

This is episode 1 in our Getting Started in Electronics series. In this
episode we cover scavenging for parts. There are many different ways to get parts cheap to start a hobby in Electronics. When Enigmatic Electronics started, we just gathered all the scrap electronics we had and started removing bits and pieces until we had a pretty sizable scavenge box full of old circuit boards.  During our first few circuit projects we dug through our box and removed some components to finish building these projects.

Here is the Zombie circuit we made scavenged parts

And the blinking LED 555 timer circuit we put together

The Spark Machine and A Motor Acting Like a Generator (8-5-15 Meeting)

Using Capacitive Reactance to power an LED off of 120V (7-29-15 Meeting)

This video helped us understand the relationship between impedance, resistance, and capacitive/inductive reactance. https://youtu.be/xyMH8wKK-Ag

We couldn't find a 0.47 uF cap but we were able to find two 1 uF caps which we connected in series to attain an overall 0.5 uF.  nothing melted so success.