Sound (clap) activated circuit, help please

[sonyaquinn]

Hi all, Im new to this forum and my level of electronic knowledge is small enough (secondary school Ireland, Irish equivalent of high school)

I need to build an electronic circuit for my technology project what it has to do is this,

Using a sound/noise/clap turn on some LED's and with another sound/noise/clap turn it off again, so Im thinking a flip flop switch in there somewhere.

Im basically making a child bedside lamp that they can turn on and off with a sound/noise/clap etc

Things to bear in mind, i want it to run on battery power only, preferably 9volt if at all possible. It has to power about 8 superbright LED's.

I don't know how to program pic's neither does my teacher, and we don't have the facilities for PCB.

I have searched around the internet but everything seems very very complicated to me, as I said before my knowledge is basic (my teacher isn't really the biggest fan of electronics at all). I know its probably a really easy circuit for all you guys out there on the forum, but as I've said before, Im only really learning.

Any help or pointers at all, would be greatly appreciated thanks

 

[audioguru]

Your idea of having a single clap perform a funtion will cause many false alarms. Most of the clapper circuits that are sold to control things use two claps to turn on something then two more claps to turn it off.

Of course the circuit is complicated. Buy one that is already made.

 

[sonyaquinn]

We are not allowed to use bought in kits, if we were my life would be so much easier.
Thanks for taking the time to reply though

 

[Hero999]

What about looking for an existing clapper design from the Internet and improving it?

Surely it wouldn't be hard to add a microcontroller that looks for two claps within a second of each other to activate or deactivate it.

 

[audioguru]

Surely it wouldn't be hard to add a microcontroller ...

But the school kid and his teacher are living in the '70s when there wasn't such a thing as a simple microcontroller.

So an electret mic driving an opamp then a rectifier driving a flip-flop. The flip-flop feeds a driver transistor for the LEDs. Many parts for a noobie to connect together without a pcb. And it will have many false alarms because it won't have a counter.

The project is for him to practise gathering parts then soldering them.

 

[Hero999]

Good point, I also imagine that he will use power hungry TTL rather than CMOS because it isn't as easilly damaged by ESD.

 

[audioguru]

Cmos isn't damaged by ESD unless you are careless. It has protection diodes at every input.

Here in Canada when the temperature outside is minus 20 degrees C it makes the humidity inside as low as 10% and static electricity is everywhere. But I have never blown up a Cmos IC, and I have never worn a ground strap.