A robot Audio System

[punarhero]

Hi all,
Our team has a project to build a robot for a museum. The robot is supposed to go to each picture, autonomously, and play a pre-recorded info. Well, our problem is what to use for the audio system. What we had thought of doing is keep a count of the picture number the robot is at, and play a corresponding track on our audio system. But there are several problems:
1. If we use a tape-recorder, we can turn the tape on when the robot is at a picture, keep time of how long it takes to play each track, then turn it off. This way we can play each track with each picture. the problem is that a tape recorder is not user friendly, and someone who wants to change a small part of the tape will have to go thorough a lot of prouble.
2. We could use a CD player, but once we turn it off, it starts off at the first track.

So, we wanted something that we can connect to a relay, turn it on and off according to the picture we are at, and play a corresponding audio track. Any suggesstions?

[Bill-Boelk]

put bar codes on the wall and digitally store the information inside your robot. as the robot get to the picture it scans the barcode and plays your info.

[Kevin Sevcik]

how long of an audio clip is it? if it's not a long speach or something, I think you could just use a series of recordable sound chips with some fancy wiring into some speakers. Here's a link:

Sound Chips

a little dilligent searching could probably turn up some other chips with a little more capacity.

Edit:
In fact there's a link at the bottom of the page to a much more versatile and capacious setup.

[blindguyinanorg]

with most current models of portable cd players, the cd resumes after stopage. another option would be to just pause the player instead of stopping it.

[Andrew Rudolph]

You could use smart chips so that you wouldnt need the robot to look for a barcode on the wall, lots of places use smart chips now they work some way i dont know, do some research.

You could use a vision recognition system like the CMU Cam

http://www.acroname.com/robotics/par...MUCAM-KIT.html

Also you could use a robot controller that is a single board computer, like the Via mini ITX robotics system

http://robots.net/article/983.html

Then you can have it access files stored on a hard drive and it would solve some of the issues you are having, maybe even just using an Mp3 player with your system in general. There are lots of websites about people building thier own Mp3 players im sure you can find somehing that will help you.

[Jeremy_Mc]

Following up on Andrew's post, using a full computer could also give you the advantage of some modern OCR systems for text recognition...who needs smart chips and bar codes when you can just read the title?

[velocipenguin]

Depending on how long each audio recording needs to be, you could use a Winbond addressable recorder chip (http://dkc3.digikey.com/pdf/T041/0301.pdf) to store the recordings and a microcontroller to trigger each message at the appropriate location. Distance measurement could easily be performed using encoders attached to your drive wheels.

[Justin Stiltner]

IF you were using an entire computer doing ocr you could use winamp to play mp3 files of what you want to say from a cd... and I would reccomend using line following to navigate, and watch for obsticals... such as ppl, little kids.. ect.

[Andrew Rudolph]

Yeah you definetly need to have some sort of obstacel avoidance system. you could set up a system of way points much like GPS systems work using encoders to constantly track the position of the bot. Maybe you could use one of the cye robots, they have a great waypoint system

http://www.personalrobots.com/

[Rickertsen2]

Originally Posted by punarhero

Hi all,
Our team has a project to build a robot for a museum. The robot is supposed to go to each picture, autonomously, and play a pre-recorded info. Well, our problem is what to use for the audio system. What we had thought of doing is keep a count of the picture number the robot is at, and play a corresponding track on our audio system. But there are several problems:
1. If we use a tape-recorder, we can turn the tape on when the robot is at a picture, keep time of how long it takes to play each track, then turn it off. This way we can play each track with each picture. the problem is that a tape recorder is not user friendly, and someone who wants to change a small part of the tape will have to go thorough a lot of prouble.
2. We could use a CD player, but once we turn it off, it starts off at the first track.

So, we wanted something that we can connect to a relay, turn it on and off according to the picture we are at, and play a corresponding audio track. Any suggesstions?

How long are the clips? There are voice recorder ICs, that are basically a single chip sound clip player. I think radio shack even sells them.

You could also wire a relay up to the next track and pause butins of a CD player. You could also use a computer or palm pilot with audio capibilities, wihc could double as the robot controller.