The Traumatizer

http://tinyurl.com/pepu2mw Secret SALE at Lightake
Boss came to me one day and asked for an old boombox to be outfitted with flashing LEDS and some strobes as a prop for a video shoot he was scheming. So he ordered one off eBay and I got to work outfitting it with LEDs embedded in the speakers while he also located these emergency flashing strobes than run off a single D battery for days, and I was able to take the self-contrained charge/strobe and retrofit them into the lower driver in each speaker housing, since as it turned out weren't even actually fitted with drivers at all and were purely cosmetic speaker cones. Hooked it all up to a Boarduino to control the LED sequencing even though in the end I went with a simplistic routine that random picks one of the 7 LEDs in each speaker, and then decides randomly if it should be on or off. I found the symmetry and unpredicability, while not truely 'random', was still highly captivating. Things were progressing along nicely and was getting ready to work on using the original play button as a mean of activating the LEDs when boss came and asked for it to be remote controlled. So back to the drawing board for a bit originally thinking "oh I'll just get some xbees and be done with it" then I realized the cost of the xbees was rather pricey since it's a lot more than simple dumb wireless link, and there were also concerns about using 2.4GHz since originally boss had wanted to use a bluetooth sender with a video running visual timecode and the audio for the music video being shot on his iPhone as a backup sync but that proved too unreliable in our over saturated with 802.11-flava WLAN SoHo office, but I digress. Poking around a bit on SparkFun's site I came across from very cheap (~$10 combined) 315/435MHz RF serial ports that seemed very promising and worth pursuing. They arrived promptly so wired things up with a duinostamp acting as remote and got... disappointment. After a bit of troubleshooting I hit Sparkfun's forums and found VirtualWire, a rather cromulent library someone had made to easily enable use of these cheap RF modules with Arduinos, and sure enough the example scripts worked first try. Further code hackery, sourcing the appropriate enclosure for the remote, moving from breadboard to soldered protoboard, dealing with failing strobes, dealing with triggering the strobes properly (why didn't I listen to my gut and just use a relay in the first place? I don't know, but several dismaying iterations later that's what finally worked), getting the remote to work at more than a few ft (measured 96ft once I hooked the receiver to the original radio antenna from the boombox!), working a reset button into a hidden back compartment to turn the LEDs off, sourcing the Arduino + LED power from a 9V in the cassette deck & using the original case's battery holder for the D cells powering the strobes so it was serviceable without disassembly - and finishing everything up. And.. this is what I wound up with - look for it in Jaydiohead's Ignorant Swan video coming soon!