Hawaii Five-0 Theme Song Inspires Retro-Futuristic User-Selectable MP3 Doorbell
This is a great story from start to finish that starts with the finished project and then goes back to the beginning and through the entire learning, adjusting, and modifying-along-the-way process, including quirks, bugs, and “aha!” moments. I especially dig the evolving ‘checklist’ of features and steps necessary for completion – that’s a pretty interesting admission in addition to the straight build notes, 3D .stl files, and code.
(Kind of makes me think of a doorbell you might in a movie like Fifth Element.)
One of my daughters lives in a college house with a bunch of students. The address has the number “5050” in it. This gave them the idea. “Could you build us a doorbell that played The Hawaii 50 these song?” And of course, being ignorant, I was all “Sure not a problem!” And my unimaginable nightmare begin..
VS1053 Codec + MicroSD Breakout – MP3/WAV/MIDI/OGG Play + Record – v4: This breakout board is the ultimate companion for the VLSI VS1053B DSP codec chip. The VS1053 can decode a wide variety of audio formats such as MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, WMA, MIDI, FLAC, WAV (PCM and ADPCM). It can also be used to record audio in both PCM (WAV) and compressed Ogg Vorbis. You can do all sorts of stuff with the audio as well such as adjusting bass, treble, and volume digitally. There is also 8 GPIO pins that can be used for stuff like lighting up small LEDs or reading buttons. Read more.
OLED Breakout Board – 16-bit Color 1.5″ w/microSD holder: We love our black and white monochrome displays but we also like to dabble with some color now and then. Our big 1.5″ color OLED displays are perfect when you need a small display with vivid, high-contrast 16-bit color. The visible portion of the OLED measures 1.5″ diagonal and contains 128×128 RGB pixels, each one made of red, green and blue OLEDs. Each pixel can be set with 16-bits of resolution for a large range of colors. Because the display uses OLEDs, there is no backlight, and the contrast is very high (black is really black). We picked this display for its excellent color, this is the nicest mini OLED we could find! Read more.
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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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