What I want to make is a speaker connected to a sound source either blue tooth or wired with a bunch of sounds to choose from. I have a 10 watt horn style speaker. It would be nice if the sounds only played while in motion. I know its still pretty open ended so far but its still in the dream stage.
I know very little about electronics and audio but I’m open to ideas.
Whole bunch of ways to make this happen depending on how complicated you want to get, so lets start figuring out what you want to do.
The audio files option, how many sounds do you want? do you want to trigger them manually? are they groupable into sets you are going to shuffle? How long are they? do you want to play multiple sounds simultaneously?
For example on my robot goose, he has goose honks when driving, angry honks when spinning, and these are triggered on a shuffle play automatically when moving, he also has a series of national anthems that can be manually triggered. He uses one of these boards which gets commands from a microcontroller (any arduino/microcontroller will do), the speaker is just a standard portable speaker wired into the wavtrigger.
The microcontroller in my case reads off sensors on the wheels to determine speed and motion, then sends commands to the wavtrigger to play audio tracks that are stored on an sd card.
For the bluetooth option is this just for streaming audio so you’ll use your phone to control it?
This can be as simple as a bluetooth module and an amplifier hooked up to your speaker. Motion sensing could get a bit more complicated but you could go as simple as a switch you stand on on the deck that then applies power to the bluetooth module.
I’d like to have a set of about 20 sounds. I would like to trigger them manually but if they could be motion activated that would be even better. They don’t have to be group-able into sets. The length of each sound will vary. Some a 5 sec loop, others a couple seconds longer. They won’t have to play multiple sounds simultaneously.
The microcontroller you have that reads off controllers sounds like what I’m looking for. If it could read wheel speed and motion that would be great. A Harley Davidson sound while in motion would be great as one of the sounds that would quiet down and become silent as I came to a brake.
I threw the bluetooth/cell phone option out there just in case the arduino/microcontroller option doesn’t work. But I would prefer not loading more things on to my phone etc.
There are also competing models, and outright clones available from the usual suspects:
The benedini product i got is called a TBS Mini, and requires a windows app to load & program, but it is waaay more than I needed for just a throttle-responsive engine sound. I think the target market is for people that run simulation cranes or planes or tanks, as it has all sorts of triggerable sound effects, and some that can integrate with RC outputs at the same time, for guns and smoke effects, etc. worth looking into before you try to build your own.
I’m not in the RC crowd so I didnt even think to look there. I need to know if I can swap out or add additional sounds and if the volume will be loud enough . I’ll look into it.