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Building A Museum Listening Station?
Anonymous Coward writes "I am building a museum exhibit which requires the use of 10 listening stations. These should be able to play back a few minutes of audio, should have an obvious Play button (and no other buttons: less confusion for the elderly and less to break for the kids), and should be able to work with an absolute minimum of supervision for three months of constant use. There are fancy ready-made solutions to this problem, but at $350, it would be too expensive to buy 10 of them. Similarly, there are cheap solutions ($20 CD player + $15 headphones), but this is probably not reliable or user friendly enough for this exhibit. Does the Slashdot community have any suggestions for how to build a reasonably inexpensive museum listening station?"
You should be able to pick up an older solid-state MP3 player for next to nothing. Wire it up with a DC adapter, connect the Play button, and either use headphones or amp it to a speaker.
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Instead of 10 seperate stations, why not have one system that runs all the booths. It could be a PC with ten seperate sets of USB headphones, and some specially configured software. I'm sure this wouldn't be too difficult for someone to develop...
You can find 16Mb mp3 players for about $20.
Toss in a cheap pair of speakers and a power supply and mount the entire unit in a box with a single button.
Load the audio you want as the only track and it should work just fine.
What do you mean trout doesn't make good underwear?
1. Build listening station for today's obnoxious kids.
2. ?
3. Profit!
You could do what they do at the Stonehenge site in the UK : they have a cheapo radio receiver thingy, and buttons to tune in to one of the several languages they offer. I assume they have a base station that broadcasts on several frequencies.
So essentially, what you could do if you want to do it on the cheap is to get several low-power FM transmitters (that won't emit outside the building, presumably, I don't know how the FCC would like that) and lend cheap FM radios with preset stations to receive your broadcasts, with a little "program" sheet, perhaps glued to the receivers.
Just an idea...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The main problem here is just user interface. It needs to be very durable, and easy to use. Probably some kind of large durable play button, possibly something you'd find off of industrial machinery. That kind of stuff is made to last.
Fork out the bucks to put a few of the directed sound systems in. You won't have stolen equipment, and you'll serve the same purpose. Getting something that patrons will handle will cost you a lot more long term.
put it on a loop, if it's only a few seconds it can loop fine. Record it in a loop for say 3 minutes, set the CD player to repeat. If one does get broke it's just ear phones and they can be replaced...
--- [Insert intresting Sig here]
"...less confusion for the elderly..."
Have you considered a Victrola?
Use a regular cd player/headphones, then put a board over it, put a big plastic play button in a hole in the center of the board. Then you extend the button so that it will hit play on the cd player. If there's only one track on the cd, then no problems right?
Of course you paint the board and all to make it look pretty and avoid letting people know how ghetto the setup is.
I'd get some nice headphones but not to nice (people break them.) and the CD player BUT put a box around the CD player and rig it so that it has a big red button on the front that users press. Time the audio and make the red button stay red for that amount of time.
Alternatively you could get a boom box (more stable) or a flash stick mp3 player (no moving parts and smaller).
You'd want to make it so that if you press the button a second time it resets the timer on the light and rewinds and plays again.
Use your old PC's. Add sound cards to it and one PC should be able to support 3-4 users. And just interface a couple of push buttons to the parallel port (Be careful and use optoisolators to protect the PC). If you have 3-4 old PC's it shouldnt cost more than 100 bucks ( more around 50 largely for the soundcards).
Hope this helps
Crack open the case, find a mate with a soldering iron and wire up the play button terminals to a bigger button. The more technology you add into the equation, the more hassle.
Get a PC.
Get a Delta 1010 10 output sound card.
Install Linux.
Write a patch in Pure-Data modular that plays a wave back on a keypress.
Buy a load of switches.
Wire them to the PC's keyboard num-pad.
Breadboard a load of those little IC 2 Watt power amp chips to drive the headphons.
Done!
Cost... around $1000.
That started as a cheap and simple solution and got kinda more complicated as I typed. Sorry.
Wow! Asking for help from a community of technically knowledgable users is now considered to be lazy. What? You never ask friends or collegues questions about your projects?
Oh right, you have ALL the answers...
How does a comment like this get modded as 'Insightful'? C'mon people - USE YOUR HEADS!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
If you have lots of time, you could get mixplayd, an old pc or two, several old sound cards each, and craft a little perl to tie it all together. Probably cheaper time-wise to just buy something.
I need to get into the museum sound business.
01100010 01101001 01110100 01100101 00100000 01101101 01100101
Go to goodwill, and grab some mac LCs. $5 for the LC, $5 for the monitor, and set them up behind a box. something simple, anything. Then have one huge "play" button that when pressed, hits Any Key on the keyboard.
Have an applescript running and make it play the audio you need with quicktime whenever any key is pressed. Simple, cheap, and besides old macs you could use ANY old computer. I mention the macs only because I know those particular ones are common, cheap, MacOS 7.5.3 is a Free(beer) download, and you have the audio recording and playback hardware all there.
For the listening end, why not try to find 10 of teh old heavy duty Ma bell telephone handsets? You could run 2 wires to the speaker inside of it (coiled if you want to be fancy) and have a rugged earpiece. alternatively, you might be able to hack some of the cheaper wall plug phones sold in stores today.
As for players, look for closeout MP3 players - you could wire a switch across the play button. Another thing to look for, if teh duration of teh sound is short enough, are these "voice on a chip" thingies used in greetin cards - you might find one with enough memory for your needs at a specialty electronics parts house.
Good luck
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Some years ago, I've seen a museum in Venice (Italy) doing it with wireless handhelds (sort of colourscreen palmtop with earplugs; an off-the-shelf commercial version) and wifi or bluetooth. The handhelds were locked down, but users could read/hear/see everything in the database in different languages, and it autmatically switched to the right context if you got near another object or into another room. Very nice setup and intuitive to use...
Portable CD players can be picked up for 13-19 dollars in some stores. Burn a CD for each one that contains a single track. You can get video game style buttons on ebay or around the internet (http://www.moneymachines.com/cabinetparts.html). These heavy duty switches are pretty simple to use, and wiring them into the portable CD's shouldn't be a challenge (works on my old radio shack player). 2 buttons, play, and stop/station.
.40 8 to buy and burn 20 CD's (spares just in case)
I'd invest in a large sheath that will cover and protect the headphone cables and invest in heavy duty headphones. Probably total cost would be about
10 x 15.00 150 for the CD players
20 x
10 x 20.00 200 for good sturdy headphones that can stand the abuse
20 x 6.00 120 for heavy duty switches to wire into said CD players
75 miscellaneous parts, wires, drill bits wood etc for you stations.
Total cost 553 or their abouts. Remember, don't skimp on bad switches that can't take a pounding. Also get your museum's tax ID for your purchases so most places you don't have to pay sales tax for a non-profit.
Problems - most CD players the play is also a "pause" button. My old CD player here isn't - so if you can find them with play and pause as seperate buttons, your golden. Also soldering the switches on the landing pads requires some patience - but if I can do it - any one can.
cluge
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
I guess you were probably just trolling, but don't you think that's a little bit ridiculous? Assuming that this guy is getting paid for this, which he could certainly not be (i.e. volunteering for some non-profit organization) regardless, he obviously followed the guidelines for asking a public, technical forum a question. Polite, showed that he'd done the required google research.
As an aside, why do people so often get pissed about the ask slashdot sections? Google does an excellent job for most things, but if you're considering building some project or doing something technically interesting google doesn't always have links to all the pitfalls or the interesting storys that go along with a project from someone with experience in that area. These often end up being the most interesting threads, IMHO.
Ansi's and stupid tricks!
Find some MP3 players that look easy to hack, physically, and some arcade game buttons -- they're designed to stand up to kids whacking away at them. Periodic cleaning of the contacts with very fine sandpaper may be required, but otherwise, it should be cheap and virtually indestructable. Go to the local pizza place or arcade and find the name and number of the video game owner to get the buttons. They may even be able to help out with cabinets...
Buy 10 children from a thrid-world nation. Teach each child the lines for one of the listening stations. Tape a big red button to each of their foreheads. Problem solved (except perhaps the language thing... however, one can buy English speaking children... they just cost more).
For kicks, teach them code words. This is especially useful at parties. For example, I have taught my purchased child to masturbate when he hears the words "clam chowder". It really is a great party trick.
3cx.org - A truly bad website.
MP3 or CD in a box, just make the thing reuseable and you could sell it at the end of your exibit and make a profit from the next guy. CD in a box with an industrial strenght Play button would be my choice, build in a mechanical or electronic delay for those DH who press play twice, or have an LED to say that the message is coming. or
clock+counter+EEPROM+DAC+filter=solid state player.
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I don't have a solution, but I do have something to add...
There was an exhibit near me not too long ago, and they gave out headphones. The thing was though, all the headphones were listening to the same feed. This was a problem because you'd have one massive croud listening to the same feed and going en masse to each exhibit, it was a bit of a clusterfuck. So you'll need several different feeds to prevent a logjam like that.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
If the exhibits are far enough apart, you might get by with all 10 stations broadcasting on the same frequency. With FM, the strongest signal will capture the receiver and the others will not be heard. If that does not work, you could have an ordinary FM radio with ten frequency presets. But that would require users to switch channels.
The real plus of such a system is that you are not locked into a proprietary system. Everything in it is an inexpensive commodity item.
Mike Perry, Inkling, Seattle
Our solution cost about $60.00 with the wood for the case, the CD player was bought at best buy, and has been running flawlessly for 6 months now.
-GReg
Being a pseudo-skilled electronics tinkerer myself, the immediate solution that sprang to mind was two PCs stocked with as many PCI sound boards as would fit (probably 5 apeice) with a row of switches hooked up to the parallel port on each.
I don't know how Linux handles more than one sound board, but I'm sure the majority of the drivers do it well, so Linux would be the obvious choice due the vast array of command line music players available. The PCs wouldn't need to be more than say P133s at the very most. Total cost? Perhaps 400 GBP if you brought the sound cards new.
You would of course need to write software that polled the paralell port for button presses at, say, 1KHz. Or if you were feeling really enthusiastic you might write a kernel driver and make use of the interupt line.
In addition to the software, you'd need to build some cabinets to keep the play button and headphones securely anchored in place. A few square metres of MDF costs next to nothing, and with application of glue and nails, might even look moderately attractive.
Of course, as I say, this really relies on you being able to learn (or already know) the skills involved, namely some C coding, a little trivial electronics and crude DIY show style joinery. There may also be issues I'm not considering, e.g. local health and safety laws. With this in mind, your mileage may vary.
Hi--
I use to work for Virgin Entertainment Group, Inc. (the Virgin Megastores in the US) and other retailers where listening stations were involved.
Really you have to consider how many people will comoe through the exhibit, average age, how long the exhibit will run etc. to understand what solution is best or to really cost it out.
So if you go with $15 dollar headphones, will they stand up to being put on, taken off, people tugging on them, etc. or will you be replacing one set a day due to breakage? This naturally means each set doesn't cost $15, but each station costs somewhat higher than that. You really need to think along these lines to compare costs. Especially given your condition of minimal oversight; that means people will be more inclined to abuse them (or rather less inhibited to, and yes even the queit museum crowd will abuse equipment as we saw in our classical departments.)
You could source the sound from a single computer, but you would need multiple output channels (probably multiple sound cards) and software to support it. Other than the pre-packaged solutions, I'm not so familiar with what's available in this category.
If you want to go cheaper could you not use actual speakers, with partitions and volume settings such that there isn't too much bleed over from one sound space to another? Disney actually puts this same kind of concept to effective use on many of their themepark rides. This would eliminate the 'touch' element which usually cause headphones to die in these situations. Of course, not seeing the exhibit, it might not be practical.
What about those talking picture frames you can get at Radio Shack? Those should be pretty cheap. You could easily wire them up to an AC outlet (with a DC adapter) for constant power, a nice big play button and some cheap mono headphones. It should be easy enough to record from a CD player or computer on to one of those. The only problems would be the length of recording time and you might need to amplify the signal. This might be better suited for small sound clips rather than a few minutes of playback, but still a pretty cheap way to go about the problem.
Initially I thought of some kind of complicated bluetooth system where everyone has bluetooth headsets and the listening posts notice when new headsets come within range and start to stream the commentary to the headset but then I thought the problem with that is the same as with any wireless solution relying on giving the visitors headsets. If there a lot of visitors then they will need a lot of headsets which would be very expensive so I think you're just better rigging up an mp3 player or cd player to a big button attached to one set of headphones.
I've been to a museum (Los Alamos) and a library (Dallas public library) that use parabolic reflectors, mounted above and pointed downwards, to generate very well-defined sound patterns. They're pretty amazing: You hear nothing if you are standing just outside the "pattern." The other plus side is that you can use a low-output speaker, since the reflector will "amplify" the sound by focusing it to a small footprint.
I've worked on audio for museum exhibits and am currently doing work for an audio tour that will be presented at a prestigious museum in Washington, D.C. There are a few firms involved in this kind of work and the equipment is expensive because it is made in small quantities and is extremely rugged. For the portable audio tour devices, there are industrial-grade, sophisticated charging racks and the individual audio devices have buttons and features so that visitors can see the exhibits in any order and learn more about individual stops (think "hyperlink").
Using consumer-grade CD players, MP3 players, and headphones for a museum exhibit is like replacing a pay phone outside of a convenience store with a $10 phone from Walmart. If it was possible to put on an exhibit with $50 worth of equipment per person, then the big companies like Acoustiguide, Antenna Audio, and Tour-Mate would be driven out of business by cheap competitors.
Why do people assume that anything expensive must be overpriced? Sometimes things are expensive to buy because they are expensive to make. And often they are still as cheap as they can be for their intended use. Police departments and rescue squads pay a lot of money for Motorola and Icom walkie-talkies and in-vehicle radios, but it doesn't mean that equipping police cars and ambulances with $40 Cobra CB radios and giving cops $50/pair Uniden FRS/GMRS walkie talkies would be a clever move.
The parent is a smacktard.
Use Woody Norris's Hyper Sonic Sound Speakers these are directional speakers with no spill... Just point them down from the ceiling. Anyone standing within a few feet area would hear it.
t ions/ 2003-05-19-hss_x.htm
h ttp://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=35255t tp://www.acoustics.org/press/133rd/2pea.html
Licenser:
http://www.atcsd.com/tl_hss.html
Other info about it:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techinnova
http://www.woodynorris.com/
http://www.reallycooltoys.com/news/news10.html
h
Oooh, the old heavy duty Ma bell telephone handsets, as mentioned in the parent post would be brilliant.
Then start the recording with a few signals as if you are waiting for someone to pick up. Then start your presentation.
Or skip the signals, maybe that's cheezy. In any event. Everyone will understand how do handle that equipment.
The "interface" can't get any simpler than that and it has a nice feel to it too.
Maybe you can hook it up to one of those really cheap solid state mp3 players that everyone keeps talking about in this thread. Or maybe it would be possible to "short circuit" an answering machine somehow.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
I thought all you needed to do at stonehenge was hug the bits of rock and you'd recieve messages direct from the godhead.
$350 each, and you need 10?! That's almost... $1000!
single chip voice record/playback chips are realy cheep and simple,
if i had to bulid these things thats what i'd use.
how hard is it to stick them on a breadboard in a little box with a power supply a speaker and a big red button?
certainly not much more than 20 each
and if i was a museum curator wanting this done for next to nothing, i'd go and find a high school technical studies teacher and appeal to his/her better nature. this project would be so simple that even a tech teach could do it.
If you're interested in putting some time into building your own mp3 players, you might want to look into http://www.mp3projects.com/. By building your own player from scratch you could take steps to ensure durability and ease of use. Hook a nice, big, red pushbutton switch the the player and install it into whatever kind of case will jive with your exhibit.
--
Why the hell not? Here's some SEO: Home Inspector
Have the loop run continuously with only one track, and when the user picks up the phone it activates the skip forward button.
That works great with this interface because it doesn't matter if the recording is running continously as will be restarted when someone picks up the phone.
It is not like a button and a headset where they will put on the headset first and be confused by the recording before they hit the button.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
Of course, you'll probably want to hide the boxes because they'll look ugly.
Easy, automatic testing for Perl.
Ask Slashdot: Building an Unattended Computer Presentation?
This sort of task is perfect for those 8 track carts machines that radio stations used to use for commercials. The tapes run in a loop, they automatically cue themselves back to the beginning, and when they're done cuing, the brightly colored play button flashes. You could put one under a cabinet completely all covered up (save for the play button) and it should work marvelously.
As a lot (if not all) of radio stations have phased out their cart systems in favor of digital stuff, I'd think there'd be a lot of these machines lying around. Where you'd find them, though, it beyond me.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
What is it with you people? The button should be a nice, friendly, "push me and good things will happen" green.
Save the red button for emergencies, launching weapons and (if you are a super villain) initiating self destruct sequences.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
I admit it's been ages I listened to an audio CD on any equipment other than my laptop, so I may be biased. But I think if no-one has played a CD in a while it could take some time to spin up and the elderly are not going to like it...
I like the ideas revolving around industrial/arcade buttons with old-school telephone handsets. I myself have seen this at a couple of British museums. Dunno what provides the sound though... I guess old PCs or MP3 players are the way to go.
This is good. It would be interesting if you reported back to us how well did you fare whichever the final solution is!
The revolution will not be televised.
I was a curator and builder for over 20 years, 11 1/2 years in a childern's museum (yes some people don't ever wise up.) Now I'm in IT not much of an improvement. Just pays a liitle better. Anyway I only have one suggestion. Spend the money and buy the equipment. Hell yes it is expensive, but by the time you locate the armored cable, the heavy duty controllors, the heavy duty buttons, so on and so forth you won't have saved that much money. The right manufacturers have been making theses items over 40 years they know what they are doing. unless you can produce the boards yourself and program the digital chips which what I have done in the past it isn't worth the effort to do it in house trust me I have been there.
How about something like this? 90 Second Sound Recorder It's sole purpose is to play the same sound over and over again. This one will set you back about $30. You can spend more or less depending on what you need.
Get a bunch of old CD-ROMS , the kind that has the play button on the face plate. Get them all powered off of a computer power supply and use the 1/8in phono output on the front display as output. It is fairly easy (as in big solder points) to add your own big red button to the already existing infrastructure. You don't need a computer or sound cards. Cost is nominal. best of luck
A Simple interface, lockup the box ad just have the controller available - These are cheap, capable and reliable.
Man: General! I think I hear something!
(The man's superior arrives)
"What is it Jenkins?"
"It's... well, it's hard to hear, but I can just make out footsteps, on a squeaky floor. And every few seconds, there's a cough with a slight echo."
"My ghod, it sounds like..."
"That's what I was thinking, General, the tale-tale audio signature of a museum! Exactly what this Museum Listening Station was designed to find."
"I'm going to have to call NORAD at once. Can you tell me anything else? Do we know what kind of museum?"
"Negative Sir. It's a large one though. We could be looking at a Natural History Museum, or possibly one of the larger art and antiquities collections"
"Large? Jenkins, this could mean they're preparing for a first strike! Hell, if this thing hits us, the school trips alone will decimate the entire nation! Wait right there! I'm going to get the President on the line!"
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Otherwise, you'll spend 10 times that amount in labor keeping it fixed and customer aggravation.
$3,500 isn't a lot of money these days. Do the right thing.
i would go for the el cheapo CD players. open them up and wire the play and stop buttons, say, with just one button on front. you'll have to build that anyway. then distributing the content to them will be a little tedious but very easy: burn the 3-minute CDs and leave them in there. if one dies the parts are trivially cheap.
We use the Chipcorder at work for our music-on-hold. It runs for months without attention. Jameco is one of many distributors of these chips.
They'll directly drive a speaker, though not very loud. (it'll work in a quiet place; you'll need an external amplifier if there's noise) There's very few parts needed besides the chip.
if you go along with everyone else's well thought out MP3 player/CD player, then you'll have a couple of staff running around on busy days replacing batteries, overworked units, etc. why don't you guys have a bake sale to raise the damn money to buy equipment that was made for the task?
The reason girls and Windows users don't understand UNIX is because all the documentation is in Man files.
has a display of speakers for "the people" to test. Find an employee, tell them your sob story, ask them if you can look inside to see how it's cobbled together.
They're usually a powerstrip, a portable cd player, a spliter for the audio, in a heap of particle board with lamenate on top. If you have a shop, and need different kiosks, by all means, you can bust these kinds of things out. Ten will be a little bit of work if they're going to be nice at all. And your materials are going to be not exactly inexpensive ($10 powerstrip $20 CD player wood etc.) but they can get in under $350 per. But with labor, depending on what you figure your hourly rate to be, you might not be beating the price you were quoted.
I used a cheap solid state personal recorder that could record and replay ($75). I got one with USB transfer so that I could make a quality recording on my computer and load it on the player.
I next popped open the case and soldered a lead to the play button so that I could run a large, solid button to the display case front. I then ran the speaker output to a simple little amp (look online for simple plans or buy one) and then onto a 10" speaker.
The larger speaker gives a nice mellow sound which people tend to enjoy more than the tinnie sound of a smaller speaker.
Good luck.
Huh?
If you're thinking of headphones I can recommend the Audio Technica ATH-M30. I use them in my record store for listening stations and they're both excellent quality and very reliable. At $49 on Amazon you can't do better. I'm a bit of an audio nut and I've tried most everything.
I know it's late and a whole heap of people have posted things, many of them excellent ideas. However, I think if you were to provide some more information about the content of the exhibit, it might help to find a solution that fits in with the problem. For example, if it was some kind of 1970s technology exhibit, the "Old Ma Bell phones" suggested above would be a nice touch. Similarly, for a newer topic, the "old macs" plan would also be entertaining if it fitted in.
Also, when we say "10 listening stations", we mean '10 sets of headphones that can play back the same material', right? I'm assuming that they need to be able to play independantly on demand though, so the really cheap solution of 1 old pc, 1 soundcard, 1 output splitter/amp (us$40 or so AFAIK) and 10 pairs cheap headphones wouldn't work.
Anyway, any replies from the original poster about the content and aims of the exhibit would be appreciated, lest the entire /. discussion be rendered pretty much academic. Actually, that would rule out most /. discussions. Oh well. Good luck with it!
Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
-- Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
Assuming that you have some desire to bodge something together to save money, there's a couple of different routes.
1 or more PCs with multiple sound cards would be doable, but you might have issues like storing them (large lockable locations, with adequate cooling, noise issues, etc), noise on long headphone runs, lots of software & wires to rig, etc.
As you mentioned, multiple $20 CD players would be doable, but the mechanics inside might be iffy. More expensive players would probably be required. Lag caused by spin-up might be irritating. Players on constant repeat (need a restart button of course) might work, but might suffer mechanical failures quickly.
A good option would be to go digital. Find a memo-recorder, mp3 player, or digital answering machine that has appropriate button controls. Essentially you want a configuration where minimal buttons are needed, you'll probably have to try a few to figure out the specific details.
Ideally, one button would start and restart playback (remember that people are going to leave halfway through a dialog, and the next person will want to restart.
In a worst case, one button to start playback and one button (e.g. Previous Track on a MP3 player or Back on an answering machine) to restart the presentation.
-Make sure that the units don't have an auto power off feature (cause you'll be running them off power supplies anyway, right)
-Either custom cut panels exposing only the required button(s), or pop open the units and solder connections to new buttons (buy big quality buttons that'll withstand pounding).
-If the units have an LED/LCD that indicates activity, consider making that visible (cutout or extension for LEDs) to provide user feedback and minimize unessecary button mashing.
-As others have mentioned, if using headphones, buy the most durable you can afford, and make sure to rig them with a stress relief.
-Have spares. You *are* trading some amount of durability for cost....but remember that "Perfect is the enemy of good enough."
Try as many different units before settling on one. You may save yourself a lot of grief by finding an ideal unit. Try to avoid the absolute crap too, it may be worth getting units that are a step or too up the foodchain (especially since they'll be functioning above the normal consumer level).
those are NOT radios..
they are solid state mp3 player type devices...
you enter a track# and it plays it from internal memory... and they are not cheap devices at all...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
your setting up a museum - but cant afford $3500? is it in your backyard or something? he must have spent his money on the building design
There are plenty of solutions out there, but I would suggest (with hindsight) that you:
1) get a cheap PC, maybe one of those really tiny uITX boards or an old laptop with a USB port
2) search on Google for "USB multichannel audio" and find something like a 4 channel out, 4 channel in, USB audio card. Buy two for $150 each. NOTE: this will be an 8 channel MONO solution
3) the PureData solution is probably the best solution for software.
4) for the switch interface, use an old keyboard, rewire the buttons to dedicated external switches. This is a such a tried and true method done by MANY artists with little technical knowledge.
5) I totally agree with using old video game buttons for the actual switches, the number of times I've been to a gallery and the buttons are broken ...
6) multi-channel amplifiers are expensive, buy 4 stereo headphone amplifier kits. Split each left and right channel out to each headphone for a total of 8 MONO channels
7) buy cheap headphones, they get broken, face it.
Gee, I'd like to help, but I'm old and confused and they don't let me do things here in the home that they used to. Why just the other day I was helping this young guy fix his doorbell. He said he was an engineer, but he sure wasn't as smart as the engineers that made my hearing aid, nosiree! Now, that was back in the time when you had to really know a thing or two about electricity, AC and DC it was back then. Back before those longhairs stole the name and made it into a rock and roll band. Why, what's the matter with Elvis anyway? Not loud enough for you? Back then we had amplifiers with real tubes in them. The kind that would burn your fingers when they got hot, and would send out purple sparks when you dropped your reading glasses into the chassis. Big purple and green sparks they were.....
just noticed that that audio website has an 8 channel output version for the same price: here
1) Get 2 really cheap PC's. Make sure they have 2 RS232 ports each
2) Add a 3rd IDE interface (you can have 4).
3) Install 1 HD and 5 CD-ROM drives in each PC. Cheap ones will do since we are using them to play CD's, not read data.
4) Hook the speakers/headphones up to the headphone out on the CD-ROM drive, no sound card needed.
5) Get those nice video game buttons mentioned in some of the other posts. Hook them up to the serial port. Use the CarrierDetect, DataSetReady and DataTerminalReady lines rather than the data lines on 2 of the serial ports. It's easier to detect those.
6) Write an application to poll the serial port and kick off the appropriate CD-ROM when pressed
15 of these
Pick up the handset of the POTS phone, wired through to a Linux system running Asterisk with, say a Dialogic D/120JCT-L 12-port analog + voice interface, and play "voice mail" to the caller. Nothing is more intuitive or indestructable than an old-style telephone.
...but a little different. I want to create a audio/video presentation on something like a DVD or a video file to play on a small screen inside a cabinet when someone pushes a button on the outside. Anyone done anything like this?
1.) Set of powered speakers. We're using the Edirol MA-10's because everything is self contained. There's no AC brick, and they come with all the necessary cables. Very good audio quality.
2.) CD Drive in an external case. The simpler the case, the better. It's only job is to supply power to the drive. If you can get one that has its own power socket, so much the better. You can just plug the speakers into it, and plug the drive into the wall. The important part is, the drive MUST HAVE A PLAY BUTTON, not just an eject button. Only drives with a play button will work.
3.) CD with audio. Record your message, burn it as an audio CD. One track only.
4.) Solder, wire, and a switch. Take apart the front plastic on the CD drive, and see where the play button is soldered in. A little experimenting will show you where to solder the wire in. The switch should be of the momentary contact sort, like a doorbell switch, not the push-on, push-off kind.
That's it. Plug the audio-jack from the CD drive into the speakers, insert the CD, hit the switch, and adjust your audio using both the volume at the drive and at the speakers. We liked this solution because it was cheap, it was low maintenance, and it was distribution-tolerant. The only system-wide failure could be the power.
I don't think you should have moving parts. A cheap MP3 player that uses flash memory should be good.
If you can find one that "boots up" quickly from power-off, you could wire up your "play" button to do two things: briefly interrupt the supply of power to the player, and press the "play" button on the player. Interrupting the power would ensure that the player is not playing when the "play" button is pressed; therefore the player would not pause if the button were hit again, but would rather start playing over again from the beginning. (I think this is more elegant than the proposal to make it loop forever and wire your pushbutton to the next track button.)
As for a way to listen, someone already suggested an old telephone handset, and I don't think you can beat that idea. There are plenty of sturdy newer telephone handsets, but you might want to put a security cable on them so people don't just disconnect them from the phone cord and walk away. (That's assuming you use the phone cord to hook them up to the listening station; you could open them up to wire something directly, but if you bought the phone, you also bought the cord that connects the handset so why not use it?) If you can get 10 handsets from pay phones, that would of course be perfect; those are designed to be tough.
I thought about proposing you put a speaker inside some kind of protective enclosure, basically making your own "sound stick", but I think a telephone handset is a much better solution.
If you could do the "parabolic speaker" suggestion, that is also a good idea. I've been to music stores where you stand under a parabolic speaker, and you can clearly hear the audio; and someone a few feet away can't hear it. Here's a web page by someone who built one of these.
http://syrinxpc.com/speaker.html
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
On the topic of software ... and the switch interface.
There is loads of information about using a BASIC stamp as a MIDI interface.
e.g. lots of info and links here
There is lots of good software out there that will play an audio sample triggered via MIDI.
e.g. Puredata (pd) or (and this one is great fun to use!) there is Abox - Analog Box
For a beginner, I would go with Abox because it has loads of good tutorials, has a fully working downloadable demo, is cheap to buy, is FAST (written in x86 Assembler I think), and is really small (less than 1MB)
A few years ago, Vikki was tagged to create the animatronics control for our gem club's display case. Besides running the various pieces of equipment, it had to run in synch with the audio track. To minimize the possibility of breakage, she used a pair of inexpensive amplified speakers, driven by a PIC-based microcontroller, with the audio being handled by one of the solid-state programmable "tape recorder" chips.
;) ).
It was fairly simple. The only moving parts, aside from the displays, was the "start" switch. Nothing to break, no motors to worry over, no lenses to fret about. Radio Shack has these chips, too, so you can get them fairly cheaply, and they work quite well (years ago, I used one of these to "hack" into a "closed" 440mhz repeater near McHenry, by digitally recording the "activation" sequence on the input side, and wiring the playback through the microphone of the "pirate" radio. Pretty slick, if I must say so myself
Lemon curry?
...I'd say that this person is looking for a PORTABLE solution that can walk with the user. The problem with portable MP3 players is that they have more value to someone who would want to steal them. I'd say that a centralized system with wireless audio would be more appropriate and would lose the attractiveness as well. Just a few super cheap FM stereo walkman type devices each tuned to a specific frequency and an X10 control device to trigger playback for that unit should be inexpensive enough. Have a computer with multiple sound outputs wired to multiple low power xmitters that correspond to specific portable stations. The X10 device stops and starts the recording on the frequency that the attached radio is tuned to. Voila! All for about $5 per device. Of course you woul have to make sure the museum's electircal lighting grid would carry the X10 signal. Sure it's ugly as sin, but cheap and relatively reliable.
What? Stylish to? That's a requirment as well? OK, go with the out of the box solution then...
Honestly, if you want more assistance with this:
1. How log do the recordings have to be?
2. Do they need to be portable, or is this a fixed station that a person walks up to?
3. Is this a one shot deal, or will the system need t be re-usable?
4. If it's portable, does it need a small form factor?
The major metropolitan museum I frequent, uses tape based walkman devices. Inexpensive and pretty disposable. Unfortunately, when dealing with the public, you really can't expect to have a device that is durable AND inexpensive. Sometimes lo-tech is the best appraoch even if it isn't stylish.
Un-news
Hire 10 Indian programmers to recite the audio on demand.
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
less confusion for the elderly
That's rather rude. There are plenty of older people perfectly confortable with compuers, and at least as many young luddites.
The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development
Use a regular cd player/headphones, then put a board over it, put a big plastic play button in a hole in the center of the board. Then you extend the button so that it will hit play on the cd player.
Warning, though. If someone pounds a button really hard, then they'll crack the CD player's PC board.
Preferable: disassemble the CD player and put an arcade-machine pushbutton in parallel with the existing button.
Alternatively: make a button with limited travel, where the force is absorbed by the case. Use a spring-loaded plunger to actually push the button on the CD player, so that leaning on the button won't put more than the spring's compressive force onto the player's button.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
just buy some cheap portable cd players... paint them orange so people won't steal them. millions of americans can use cd players already, and if they can't figure it out... just show them!
I work for the largest producer of traveling interactive exhibits for children's museums, science museums, etc... in the USA. Our traveling show on Africa just came back from a 5 year run. All of the audio was done with cheap Sony (DON'T use another brands, they don't hold up) CD players (bought refurbished, in bulk, from a Sony outlet store... check their online store as well). They were controlled by a Basic Stamp programmed so that when the play button was pressed, they pulsed a DIP reed relay which pulsed the start contacts, then timed out so that further presses wouldn't have a problem with the play/pause being on the same button. Cheap amplifiers from Radio Shack, push buttons from Happ Controls (Accept NO substitutes, no one else's are worth a damn), and either small speakers from Radio Shack or armored phone headsets from ID Tell in NYC round out the package. Burn a single audio track on each CD, assemble it in a compact box, and you're good to go. Don't try to use headphones; if you don't build your own out of armor jacketed cable and industrial ear protector headsets, they WILL NOT hold up. Total cost will be under $100 per station and the sound quality will be as good as any industrial DMR out there, while being RELIABLE and EASILY SERVICED (EXTREMELY important considerations in the museum environment). Anything involving a PC for something like this is technical overkill and simply won't hold up in the museum environment.
Alternatively, you can buy a rather nice product that does precisely that (in stereo, too!) See www.purestereo.com
Apologies for the page layout, but I'm an engineer, not a webmaster.
It sounds like the original poster is looking for a much cheaper solution than anything we offer, though. Expect a professionally built custom solution to cost somewhere between a few hundred to a thousand dollars per station, depending on how fancy you want it to be. Building ten or twenty custom units for less than $100 each just isn't going to be worth the time for anyone who needs to work for a living, no matter how simple your requirements.
Hacking together a simple listening station isn't that hard - making it look nice and work reliably, as well as having support available when things go wrong (When you build a custom product for someone else to assemble, things _always_ go wrong) - that is what costs money.
Last summer I built an installation that stood unsupervised for 3 months, with a soundtrack running from a portable philips cd player on repeat, 24/7. Still using the player today as walkman. Insane, totally insane. I was sure it'd break down.
-+-+ C R O S S R O A D S +-+-
Fits the price.
Has CD player.
Has disk for cache.
Has network (handy).
Has audio out.
Has Joe public proof buttons (standard controller) or easy to to replace custom buttons available.
Unless you need stereo, it might be cheaper and better in the long run to go with a simple speaker device that the user holds to their ear. Like the wireless ones that art museums use, only in this case wired. This way no twisting of people yanking it off their heads, etc.
Perhaps simple cheap phone handsets. Easily replaced, too.
I once rigged up a really cheap portable CD player to a phone system to play a CD with announcements and music recorded on it when people were put on hold. The CD looped 24/7 for well over a year until I left the company and for all I know it's probably still working.
Three months, no problem.
Windows is a bonfire, Linux is the sun. Linux only looks smaller if you lack perspective.
Is that a custom sig for this thread? I was thinking of asking why everyone who specified a color for the play button said it should be red, but I guess, deep down inside, I knew the answer all along. Thanks for pointing it out anyway.
Language students: Don't try to learn English here. This ain't it.
of Talking Greeting Cards
I purchased a Sony Walkman in 1986. The first one broke in less than a month, but I took it back and got a free replacement that works to this day. I used to listen to it at work, and often "paused" it (which kept spinning the disc) and forgot about it, leaving it running over night, over weekends, and even over vacations. Never had any problem with it. I used to be amazed at the reliability, but really isn't that how things should be?
"Lord, grant that I may always be right, for Thou knowest that I am hard to turn" -- A Scots-Irish prayer
A suggestion. Whatever electronics you end up using, wire out the play button to a big pushbutton you buy from these guys:
http://www.happcontrols.com/
They sell video game / amusement parts, and we used to buy all of our controls from them. They just don't break, even with a hundred eight-year-olds slamming their fists into them for six hours each day.
As for the electronics themselves, there's a right way and there's a cheap way. The right way is to use something like the Radio Design Labs FP-MR1, which is a bulletproof digital message repeater. It's exactly what you want, but it's $225 each. The cheap way is to try and find a CD player or MP3 player that can boot up right into behaving the way you want -- either repesting all the time with the big button wired to the "forward" button or playing then pausing, with the big button wired to the "play" button. Unfortunately, it's likely on the CD player side that the only players that will do what you want will be pro models, and will cost several hundred dollars each.
Good luck!
Go grab a couple of embedded systems like the 200mhz geode or cyrix with 8/10 inch lcd. Run a ltsp (http://www.ltsp.org) server that delivers the content to the slim terminals and enjoy ten of them for under 600 bucks(Iopener's run under >70 bucks on ebay :). Then snag a cheap machine like a 2200 amd or a 2.4 p4 for about 300 bucks, You will then have a 10 user mulimedia kiosk system for under 1000 dollars. Alot better than 3 machines at 1000.
jkurtzInsertTheAtSymbolHere:)noguska.com
Here's some ideas for using flash players (IMHO, the best way to go)
- get one that can have one of those headphone cable remotes and you wouldn't even have to hack up the player to connect a play button
- either get one with a DC input, your wire a supply to the batter compartment.
- don't use headphones (if at all possible). You will definately have them breaking on you.
- make sure everything is mounted securely. you'd be surprised at how easily things can get shaken loose. use loc-tight and lock washers on all screws.
- arcade buttons are best. they are designed for this kind of abuse
- if you need to prevent hitting the button while it is playing (to prevent pausing) and you know a thing or two about circuits, make a simple silence detector. audio->comparator->retriggerable timer->opto isolator. put the opto isolator output in series with the button.
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
Nice job.
I'm not sure if anyone bought this up yet, i've was too lazy to look at all the responces.
Every CDrom drive I know of has a test jumper somewhere that is the equilivent of Play / Next track. Eject is stop, you don't want to wire that one up. CDplayers typicaly require two buttons to operate, a CDrom drive will operate on one button only, it will play when you hit the button, it will jump to next track when you hit the same damn button. They are predictable, cheep, and easy to operate, and painfuly easy to setup if the test jumper in on the rear of the drive as they commonly are.
You can talk about using PCs and such as many others have done too... and you can do this in a vast number of ways. But unlike a standalone cd-rom drive, they are not by default hardwired to do one fuction, and requires more time and effort, likely money, to get it to respond to a button press in a singular predictable way.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Aaaargh they're not 'listening' stations, they're not 'speaking' stations either. Inanimate objects can do neither. I can picture some people standing around talking to your 'listening posts'. I suggest renaming them to something more catchy like 'Electromechanical Pre-recorded Voice Playing Apparatus (tm)'.
Get yourself some "Vandal-Proof Piezo Switches"
They have no moving parts and will generate a "closure" for a short period when tapped / pressed.
IP67 rated too ( you can hose them with no effect )
The ones I've seen are around AUD40 so they're not that cheap, but they are absolutely indestructible. I use them in an underground mining environment where they are exposed to all sorts of crud / acidic water / ammonium nitrate explosives and they are quite excellent.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
But antenna theater developed these and now supplies alot of big museams with these. Here is the hardware website
http://www.antenna-audio.com/
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
Just use telepathy. Nor fuss or muss with wiring power supplies, speakers or headphones.
Simple instructions, I just sent them to you telepathically.
Yeah, because if I can't easily read the whole article about it, I want to remain unaware that it's happening.
Seriously, you pay that much because they are designed to take some punishment, and probably do english/french/german/spanish too - very important next time the museum is audited by the tourism board.
Cheapo digital answering machines have a minimum of buttons, and play back loop. The old tape answering machines are even cheaper. Asset: cheap and easy to configure for your task. Drawback: this solution really does look cheap.
More music, fewer hits
you have described a low end answering machine.
Pick up ten discontinued answering machines.
They have phones attached.
That wasn't hard, was it?
Best bet... get one of those el cheapo voice recorder chips. You store the sounds on the onboard ram, and its got inputs. you activate one of the inputs and it plays the sound. You designate how long the sound is etc etc by simple jumper settings. I think its even a kit at dick smith electronics.
I *really* like this solution. Those handsets feel so right and are easy to use. They have plenty of room inside for several different approaches to the problem. But I see one problem.
Nowadays, you're going to have to deal with phobic people who will complain that having the same piece of equipment touching the ears of everyone who walks by simply *must* be a health issue. Nevermind that public phones worked fine and didn't spread disease; public phones are becoming extinct in the U.S. People today are accustomed to having something that is exclusively theirs. They are also paranoid about the transmission of disease.
I'm not saying these complaints are legit. I'm saying that if you use this solution, you're going to have to think out a strategy ahead of time for dealing with the silly people. If you're cool with that, the old-style handsets seem to me to be the way to go.
Cool idea. Congrats to parent to thinking it up.
If you don't need stereo sound, then each sound card (stereo) output can be used to handle two headphones.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Did you enquire whether the professional solution is available for rent?
Alternatively, why not print up the words on paper and place them alongside the relevent exhibits? This has the advantage that more than one person can use it at a time, and it's cheap, leaving cash free for possibly better causes...
need a free COBOL editor for Windows?
If the museum you are building this for can't spend $3500 on listening stations, find an exhibition management firm that can. I've done a lot of these things and if you want it running 3 monthes do it it right. Any time you do this "cheap" you are setting the exhibition up for disaster and the Museum up for a black eye.
In terms of thermal stress, the difference between 8-14hours/day and 24/7 is roughly zilch. Having the CD player running in an absolutely stationary position might actually seem like a bit of a vacation.
WIth hard disks, the main failure-incucing stress is usually startup/shutdown. If the CD player is simply running, this should actually be easier on them.... Having them continuously running would also minimize thermal stress.
That having been said -- If you can find some cheap MP3/OGG players for the same price, you're likely to be better off with NO moving parts other than the (big-ass Video-game quality) push-button..
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I used an old Sony Discman for the on-hold music at an ISP I used to work for. It lasted around 18 months playing continuously... That was totally insane.
640YB ought to be enough for anybody.
I think a major un-asked question here is how long does this exhibit have to last? "Ruggedized equipment" costs a bundle, but it's designed to stand up to years of hard use - overkill if we're talking about days or weeks here.
My own suggestion would be cheapo CD players locked in a box and controlled by equally cheapo headphones with remotes (which aren't that hard to find these days) - tie them off in some manner so that kids can't bust the cd player by yanking on the headphone cord. People can't access the actual player, so your main problem there is mechanical wear and tear, and you can stock up on spare headphones (which will take a beating).
You'll wind up spending the money you saved on hardware in supervision time and hassle (since someone has to keep replacing the headphones), but it should get you through a short exhibit - say a couple of weeks max.
Saw this one in an old Home Automation webpage:
1 Radio Shack Talking Picture Frame: $20
1 Big Red Button
Snip apart a Cat5 cable for twisted pair wires. Mount the frame behind the box. Solder the wirest to the Big Red Button and the Play on the talking picture frame. Record up to 30s of digital audio, and you've got it.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I get the impression that this is sort of a "if your only tool is a hammer, every problem is a nail" situation, where the hammer is technology, to the exclusion of considering other options like simply getting the $3500 and getting a rugged, public-tested solution.
This is a potentially high-traffic, high-abuse type of display (just visit a museum with that already uses that $3500 audio system (I've seen them before) and observe how school children (ab)use them! :-o. I'm sure the "total cost of ownership" of the $3500 solution will be lower than anything cobbled togethered - how soon will you need to make a repair? How much will the capital and labor costs (even donated) be to do repairs? Will the lower investment solution be a waste anyway if no one can used it when it breaks even other day/week?
Any legitimate museum I've seen, even those running on a "shoe string" budget, has a donor's list that could be approached ("help us with this expense and we'll put up a plaque with your name as donor next to it"). If doing this is out of the comfort zone for those running the museum, the museum is already doomed anyway.
JG
A cheap headphone splitter comes in quite handy. I've got one headphone out with my pc to tv lead and one with my headphones. The ultimate solution in laziness!
I guess I was a little over the top there. Oh well.
Have a look at www.akman.com for the audio players and look up www.happcontrols.com for the buttons. I don't know if this stuff is within your budget but it's what alot of museums are using and I think it would be alot better than the vista group gizmos.