I’ve been playing with Arduinos for a wee while now. These are small microprocessors you can build things with. They use the idea of shields which are small daughter boards that connect to the Arduino to provide extra hardware to do useful things with. One shield I have been playing with the the Adafruit Waveshield. This little board allows you to hook an SD card up to the Arduino and play .wav files from it. These are in mono, 22kHz format. Not HiFi but good enough for little projects. I decided to use one in my old phone to make it play music.
This is about the phone in my old Austin 7 garage where I am building an Austin 7 special. I don’t actually like phones (horrible, nasty things) so this one never actually did anything useful. I used an Arduino and a Adafruit Waveshield to make it into a musical phone playing suitably period songs.
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
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