Continue to Site

Welcome to our site!

Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

  • Welcome to our site! Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

Quick question

Status
Not open for further replies.

Nuxse

New Member
I'm completely new to this world of electronics. Not that I don't use them, but to the whole building it from scratch...

Anyway... What I'm trying to do is take the electric signal from my headphone wires and make that signal run some LEDs. But the strength of the signal isn't strong enough to make them light up.
So is there anything out there that could amplify the signal or something? Or something that would make the lights turn on, but the lights would use power from an external source?

Thanks for any help you guys can provide
 
There are ready-made devices that can do this, or you can build it yourself. You're correct in thinking that some kind of amplifier (or switch, more properly) is needed; the headphone signal isn't strong enough to light LEDs directly.

What electronic skills do you have?
  • Being able to read a schematic (this is essential, and not rocket science)
  • Soldering or breadboarding
  • Looking up stuff on-line or in the library

People here will probably be glad to help you come up with a simple DIY "color organ" (that's basically what you're asking about here).
 
My electronic skills are pretty much knowing how to solder and follow directions haha. But I'm wondering if there was something that would work like I have in the picture **broken link removed** It would use the electrical signal to tell the LEDs to light up on an external power source, like a small battery of some sort.
 
Last edited:
It looks as if you have plenty of room for the circuit that Colin posted. All it is is a couple transistors and a few resistors. You'd need to use a small battery, like a coin cell. Doesn't look like enough room for AAAs.

By the way, your picture is waaaaaaaay too big. Be nice and resize!
 
Last edited:
Isn't his circuit to plug in and be plugged into with the TRS jacks? How could I get it to work inside each headphone?
 
I don't know what that circuit board inside your headphone is, but all you need to do is connect his circuit to the wires coming into the headphone. Just find where they connect to that circuit board, and solder wires to those connections. (The incoming wire to the headphone, not the wire to the headphone speaker element.)
 
Last edited:
So all you've got to do is connect the incoming line, the headphone element and the input to Colin's circuit all in parallel. Be careful not to reverse the polarity of the headphone element or they'll sound weird! (Or not: does anyone know how the human hearing system responds to out-of-phase signals?)
 
Out-of-phase speakers cancel bass frequencies. Hi-Fi stores ALWAYS had the speakers connected out-of-phase then the bass tone control was turned up to maximum to try to make some bass. I always re-wired them properly and turned down the bass tone control to normal.

Close out-of-phase speakers and headphones feel like your head is wider than normal. In-phase feels like the sounds come from inside your head.
 
Not wanting to start too much of a tangent here, but it seems to me that out-of-phase headphones may behave quite differently from out-of-phase speakers, which is why I asked about the human hearing system: are we able to distinguish phase differences between our left and right ears, if there's no interaction between the signals as there is with speakers?
 
Simply connect the hot wires of stereo headphones to a mono music source and they will be out-of-phase and feel weird.
When the earphones are connected with each ear in parallel then they are in-phase and the sounds will feel like they come from inside your head.
Try it.
 
Thank you all, I've got it working nicely, but now is there a way to have the LED in sync with the bass, low frequencies, and not every part of the song?
 
Thank you all, I've got it working nicely, but now is there a way to have the LED in sync with the bass, low frequencies, and not every part of the song?
You add a lowpass filter circuit to the input of the LED driver circuit. It passes bass frequencies and blocks treble frequencies.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest threads

New Articles From Microcontroller Tips

Back
Top