Halloween SFX Player (IR Version)

This version of the Halloween SFX demo uses IR communication to trigger the SFX remotely. If you haven't already seen it, check out the demo video on YouTube .

The demo code for both the transmitter and receiver is attached to this post. The wiring diagrams are shown below. There is one diagram for the IR transmitter and one for the IR receiver (which plays the sound effects).

Don't forget to customize the sounds by substituting your own audio files!

IR TRANSMITTER DIAGRAM



IR RECEIVER DIAGRAM

Forgive my ignorance regarding both the way the Foxonix hardware works as well as IR receivers, but is there a way to design the same project without the high cost of two Foxonix development boards?

Could the receiver Development Board be replaced with a Project board instead? (I assume the answer to that is yes, but I wasn't sure if the Project Board is a one-to-one swap for the Development Board in terms of pinouts, etc).

And how about replacing the transmitter Development Board with something like an Arduino Pro Mini (why waste the audio capabilities of a Foxonix board on something so trivial as an LED flasher)?

Cost aside, it would be helpful to see more ways to use Foxonix as part of a broader "maker" ecosystem.

Thanks,

-eric

Hey Eric:

Yes, you can develop this project using Project Boards instead of the full Fox development board. Both boards have the same basic functionality, except the development board has the USB interface, the connector for programming the Project Boards, and the I/O is brought out to headers. Any program you create using the development board can be loaded onto a Project Board and it will run exactly the same. The basic idea is that you use the development board when writing and testing your program, but then you load your project onto the smaller and cheaper Project Board for use in your project or product. Of course, if you want to use your Fox development board in a project you can do that, too.

To further answer your question, both the IR transmitter and the IR receiver in this project can be implemented with Project Boards. The pin names on the Fox board and Project Board are the same, and the pinout between the boards is one-to-one.

It may be possible to use a different board like an Arduino Pro Mini on the transmit side, but Foxonix has the IR transmit and receive functions built in, so that was the easiest approach. Obviously, they are using the same built in message codes, so the two boards communicate without any extra overhead. If you wanted to use a Pro Mini for the transmitter, then you'd need to figure out what the messages from the Foxonix transmitter look like and then emulate those on the Pro Mini.

It's true that the main benefit of using Foxonix is that you can easily put speech, music, and sound effects into your projects (under microcontroller control), but it also comes in really handy for non-speech uses. We used one recently in-house to make a quick PWM DC motor controller (which didn't include audio). We used it in a toy prototype to drive a small DC motor at various speeds (forward and backward) and to read limit switches.

We're looking to expand Foxonix's reach and we'd love to make it part of the larger maker ecosystem. We think it's a great tool that fills a useful and important gap in the maker's toolbox. If you agree then please help spread the word. Great questions and comments. Thanks!

Thanks for the info; that's interesting about the Foxonix built-in I/R codes (is "IRout" part of the programming language? It wasn't listed in the Programming Reference page); and very interesting about the motor controller! Maybe they can be part of your examples as well?

As a non-electrical engineer (my only electronics experience is with Arduino), it's hard to "figure out" what the Foxonix boards are capable of. And Arduino's python/C-ish IDE comes more naturally to me than the EZ scripts I've seen so far (plus with Arduino I don't need to know what registers/ports/etc are!). Hoping as I keep using the boards it will become more familiar. But in the meantime I appreciate all the help and responses to questions.

-eric