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[Help] Art Porject - Solar Powered Speaker with Looping Audio

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jdavis1

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Hi guys,

I'm looking for help for an upcoming art show me and my friends are putting on. I will first state that I have very little actual electronics experience, but I'm well versed in computers and I have a little soldering experience.


The Project: We're looking to build a solar powered speaker that will go inside of a weather proof box fairly small in size. We would like for it to loop a sound bite of our choosing(it will be very small in size) over and over. And ideally, it would be as cheap as possible so that we can make multiple speaker boxes.

This is where you guys come in.. any help is greatly appreciated! I'm looking for any direction/links/videos/books/kits/guides anything that could help. We have until May to get this project done, but if we don't hit that deadline it's not a big deal.

I've researched a little bit on solar power and building your own cheap solar power from scraps and I think I can manage. The part that I'm really lost on and need the most help would be getting the audio onto a card/chip/memory and installing it. Also help on hooking up the power supply(solar) to the speakers and the audio.

I know I'm asking a lot but I would really appreciate any help I could get. Thank you for your time and help! :)
 
For the voice recording and playback Winbond has a series of digital all-in-one chips:

**broken link removed**

I've used their ISD ChipCorder in a project before. Looping would be easy. Their documentation has complete schematics for implimentation.

Ken
 
I started a similar project a while ago, before getting into microcontrollers...
Basically, I wanted to play a song outside as the sunset every night. I came up with a $5 MP3 player that ran off a AAA battery, 16 meg (holds about three songs). AudioGuru helped me add a simple transistor switch, so it would start playing automatically when power was applied. Spent $4.95 on a small Gameboy amplifier with two small speakers, runs of 6 volts. kind of got stuck on how to drop the 6 volts down to 1.5 volts, without a huge waste or drain, and not have to go with bigger solar panels and batteries...
 
Efficient 6v>1.5...research "Buck Converter"

**broken link removed**

Schematic on last page.

Ken
 
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