Music Box WRITEUP_IN_PROGRESS
At the same recycling store I found the frame for the housing for DayCal I found an old donation box for $10. Looking at this I was reminded of a relative of mine who loved working with wood. I saw in this box the potential for a bespoke music player. Here I document the journey from donation box to music box.
Figure 1: The original box being disassembled
Figure 2: The finished varnished box
Concept
You know what I think is cool about boxes as a control device? They're so clearly in one of two states: open and closed. I thought this might be useful for people with cognitive impairments or physical ailments. The basic idea is that the music box starts playing a random track when opened and stops when it's closed. The tracks are stored on a microSD card which can be written from most computers.
I wanted to add a twist to this concept: include a toggle switch to choose between a random song and a random poem. For this I needed a mp3 module capable of handling different folders. I found the DFRobot mini MP3 player which ticked all the boxes. The wiki (see figure) documents the serial commands the unit accepts.
Figure 3: The serial commands the mp3 module accepts
more to come