I am trying to make a dancing water fountain (meaning a water fountain that moves according to the music) and also that lights up (eg leds) according to the music. Anyone can help me please? Any circuits or ideas will be appreciated
-------------- Regards,
effie
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For the LEDs, I had an idea a while back which I haven't got round to of putting some music through 3 filters - a low pass, high pass, and midrange band pass, then measuring the amplitudes on each channel and using them to control the red, blue and green intensities of a tricolour LED. If you wanted to be really clever you could store the results in a delay buffer and shift it every 0.2-0.5 sec, and use this to drive a line of tricolour LEDs.
OK - I remember seeing those things in discos but I didn't know that's how they worked.
Another way if you had the cpu speed would be to make the line of LEDs follow a wave equation with different wave speeds for different channels. The effect would be similar but maybe a bit more interesting to look at.
In the 70's, some friends built a "color organ" into a nice wooden speaker cabinet with small colored incandescent bulbs behind a plastic diffuser screen.
Then I was in college I built a stereo color organ that had two 4'x6' displays using C7 Christmas tree light strings behind a plastic diffuser. The displays were mounted on our living room wall above the speakers.
Google for "color organ", which is the common term for a circuit which adjusts light colors or brightnesses in response to an audio signal. Lots of circuits out there will do this.
You could use a similar technique to open/close water valves, or alter the power to a water pump, in order to make the fountain "dance" to the music. Getting this to work in an esthetically-pleasing manner may be tricky due to the time lag: when you increase the water flow or pressure it'll take a very visible amount of time for the shape of the fountain to change. The fountain's shape will tend to lag the music rather badly... sort of a "Dancing with the Really Incompetent" presentation.
To make this work well, you may need some sort of time-delay system for the audio and color-organ pathway. Take the incoming audio, feed it into a delay path of 1 second or so, and feed the delayed audio to the color-organ and the amplifier and speakers. Feed the non-delayed audio into the pump control circuit. That way, the pump will speed up, and start increasing the height of the fountain, about a second
*before* the music is heard and the lights change. Play with the amount of time delay you use, in order to get the best synchronization between the music and the dancing water.
--
Dave Platt AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
That circuit is either overly complex, or, does a much better job than the 'Musicolour', a magazine (Electronics Australia) project I built as a teenager ;) The musicolour had three channels and the bass channel beat with the mains frequency on some sustained low notes, quite strange.
Is there a description or spec for your disco circuit somewhere?
I have three channels of state-variable type filters to sort which colors go with which frequency, and the "beat" is extracted via jam-locking a saw-tooth oscillator.
I wouldn't call it "overly complex... but it is manufacturable, quite repeatable.
It's so straight forward you should be able to analyze it straight away ;-) ...Jim Thompson
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| James E.Thompson, CTO | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
I didn't mean complex in a bad sense, more in that it makes me wonder what the thing is doing it is doing with the extra parts, compared to a few simple bandpass filters driving triacs.
Well, I been away from electronics a long time, and your circuit seems to do a lot more than others I've seen. Didn't recognise state variable filters.
Last ten years my work was mostly embedded controllers and very little support circuitry. The fun analog stuff I did in measurement and control systems was in late '70s early 80's.
I use my own 4-OpAmp version, avoids differential nuisances, and makes for ease of adding zeroes if you need them.
Sallen-Key, which most folk here use, are crap... terribly component tolerance sensitive in even moderate-Q applications. Though they are "cheap" ;-)
(*) Huelsman is a village idiot. When I was merely a lad of 22 years old, he was giving a presentation at Motorola, I stood up and promptly shot his whole concept down. My boss at the time, Jan Narud, laughed so hard he almost threw up.
...Jim Thompson
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| James E.Thompson, CTO | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
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