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?"

Comments

CD player works great

[cluge]

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.

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 .40 8 to buy and burn 20 CD's (spares just in case)
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

Funny, I just had to build something like this.

[GhengisCohen]

For the National Yo-Yo Museum in Chico California, I had to build a listening station that would let the user put on head phones, and be able to choose tracks for quite a lot of music More than a standard audio CD could handle (50+ tracks). I had a budget of $75.00. I purchased a portable CD player that could handle MP3 CD's. The issue was which one. Since I needed to know tracks, and I wanted the title displayed I was limited a little, and I needed buttons that could be isolated. I found a rio player of some sort (don't remember the exact model) and I built a box out of maple (to match the other displays), the cover was a thin ( We tested tons.

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

Over 20 Years in the Museum Exhibit field

[MajorK0ng]

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.

Re:All about user interface

[AmericanInKiev]

I believe you can find sound memory boards -

for 30 dollars complete with actual wire terminals etc.

try http://electronickits.com/kit/complete/audi/ck1212 .htm

link

Yes, it can be done on the cheap.

[absurdist]

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.