lab 01-tribute to old new media

As our society became more and more complicated, somehow the urgency of hearing and to be heard starts growing. The most primitive and straightforward solution is to talk louder.

Driven by this need, the first speaking trumpet was invented in 17th century. Later on, thanks to the application of electricity and transistors, the amplification of human voice made a significant leap.

In this sense, we could say that loudspeakers act as the early generation of social media.

However, even though a loudspeaker should only work as honestly amplifying the voice behind it, just like the contend we found in social media now, can we really trust what we've been told?  Or do we really mean what we are talking about?

Moreover, since I am from a country that has a special obsession with loudspeakers.

           (translation: the biggest loudspeaker in the world)

So I decided to dedicate this tribute to a portable loudspeaker, or fancier, a megaphone, which remains the shape of old speaking trumpet and using the electricity to power up at the same time. Above that, I made some changes to make it more special.

Here is how I transformed it, in case you may want to build one for some reason.

First and foremost, you need a megaphone that is 100 percent purely from China.

Second, open the megaphone from the battery entrance and take out (unscrew, unsolder and just pull hard) almost everything other than the amplifier, switch and the led.

Then I programmed Arduino Uno and used a microphone sensor and a LDR to detect input.  The intention of using the LDR is to stop playing when people moving the megaphone away while continue when it is being put back.

I used the TMRpcm library in Arduino to play the audio directly from card (using Itunes to transform the format into 32kHz, 8 bits .wav file) so the megaphone can function without extra wires coming out of it. 

https://github.com/TMRh20/TMRpcm/wiki

In order to amplify the audio, I used a transistor (BC547) to connect the amplifier and the Arduino, in this case the base of the transistor is connected with the  9 digital pin (exclusive for the library) of Arduino through an 120 ohm resistor, the collector is connected with the 5V power source in Arduino and the emitter is connected with the original amplifier in the megaphone. 

I also reserved the original switch (toggle) to control the power of the whole system according to this.

This is a clip showing how it works.

I mean, who doesn't love China.