Need Help Getting Started

Hi, I would like to create a project where I would use a pic to listen to an audio signal and on the right frequency would close a circuit to a relay to power solenoids to control animatronics. I have experience in programming. I completed the Computer Science AP course. but I dont know anything about pics. Are they powerful enough for this application?

If anyone could point me in the right direction it would be greatly appreciated. If you don't understand what Im asking I will clarify it some more.

Thanks
Randall

Hi Randall,

For switching on the Relay to power on Solenoids to control animatronics you can make use of any controllers like PIC, 8051, AVR with some Relay driver chips.


But the main question comes here How you are going to design the system in which Controller listens to the audio signal and den sample it and find out the exact frequency of that audio signal.I think for this kind of applications u may need to go for DSP controllers.:(

what source are you going to use for generating that special sound signal?

At this point I don't know. I think I may look into midi interfaces. Do you know of any other sound signals that could be used?

Actually thinking back on it midi may not work. What Im going for is to be able to store the data on a stereo audio file. And play it back on a mp3 player. One channel for the sound and the other channel for the data. I want to create a controller that will take the sound data and be able to switch on and off the solenoids. Right now Im using phidget controllers for my animatronics but i would like to set it up so I dont need a computer to run it. I searched dsp controllers on the internet. Do you have any recommendations?

the very simplest sound format and easily detectable ones are DTMF sounds. DTMF sounds are same tones that you get when you press a phone's keypad.

You could use a PIC to generate the tones.
Then use one with an inbuilt ADC to analyze the
tone and switch outputs accordingly.

However.... the safer way would be to follow Ajay's idea
and use DTMF tones.
There are cheap chips made to generate and decode tones for you.
That leaves you free to do the relays and display.. easy

Your system would even work over the phone
Sounds like an interesting project.

Sounds like exactly what I need. But currently I see two flaws with DTMF. First is there are only 16 signals. I would need more. And I need to be able to somehow broadcast two signals at a time. Ill be having multiple signals turning off and on valves at different times simultaneously, if that makes any sense. Im searching for other multi-frequency signallings.Thanks for the help. I'll update you on my progress.

how 'bout a DTMF message protocol?

you can have starting and ending delimiter tone which will not be used in message, rest all will be used.

lets say i am only using 0-9 *&# tones so * is starting delimiter # is ending delimiter, so message tone protocol will be like *336#

so you can have number of combination.

I don't think that will be fast enough. Here is a video of my animatronic running off the usb control board.
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