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

Mp3

[Dward]

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.

Re:Mp3

[davebarz]

But you wouldn't connec the button to the play/pause button, that would be silly. You'd connect it to the next track button, and just leave it on repeat with that as the only track.

Build one yourself from old computers.

[danamania]

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.

Old telephone handsets

[Registered Coward v2]

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

Cones of silence

[pongo000]

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.