Prototyping the Magnetone
I’m calling my current project the “Magnetone” because it uses a bank of solenoids to play a set of chimes. The interesting part is the data source. At the Lab we all have magnetic swipe keycards for access to various areas. Now nobody knows what’s encoded on these cards because the information is not exactly easy to read without the right tech - and anyway who wants to bother with reading them? I wanted to reveal that data in an interesting way. We all carry around little “possible melodies” with us and the magnetone can manifest them physically.
The project uses the Arduino prototyping board to send a trigger to a ULN2003A darlington array. This allows the proper current to be activated to several solenoids which strike the set of chimes. The data source will be a magentic swipe card reader which sends regular ascii keystrokes via RS-232 to the Arduino.
