Speaker Wiring and Programming

We want to put a speaker on our robot, we just finished our regional and think it would be hilarious to play an evil laugh when the catapult shoots.

what do we need, will a standard audio hookup work?
where/how do we plug it in?
what do we need to do programming wise (labview)?

Hmm…
My first thought would be to check for libraries in labview that have functionality to play WAV files, and have the file as a dependency

Not sure about hooking it up

You might want to check the rules about speakers on the robot, I think I might have read something about it

also I’m not sure what you are trying to achieve, a speaker small enough to fit in your bot wouldn’t be audible over the DJ’s sound system and the crowd noise

If you check TBA, 4607 is done playing for this year. That means they don’t have to meet all the rules with their robot any more. I’m assuming they are adding it for demo purposes or something like that.

Simplest thing might be something like this: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11029

Grant Imahara used it to build a robot for The Late Late Show: http://www.aamicron.com/3/post/2010/04/mp3-trigger-on-the-craig-ferguson-show-and-avc2010-is-approaching.html

With that you should be able to use a DIO to trigger a sound clip.

Sparky,
That is actually an interesting solution for the audio. You will need to follow up with a power amp to feed the speaker. Several are available for a 12 volt supply. You could even use an old car radio and a small FM module to transmit sound to the robot from any source.