A Wearable Voice Memo Recorder

The trinket arrived! kinda late, muh...

New problem tho, it uses a usb-micro connector. It didn't come with a cable and I don't have one.... more ordering and waiting!

let there be progress tho!

A board corey got working found us a new problem. It seems that most SD cards can stall upwards of 300ms 0.3seconds! during write, even at 8khz sampling this is waaaay too long for the avrs ram to buffer samples. we tried an 8G card, 4G card, and an older 512M card, of them, the 512M card was best, peaking its delays at about 148ms. Not sure how to solve this issue.

Okays since I'm rotting in Kidney Dialysis and there is NOTHING interesting on TV today I thought I should probably use the time to update this project, which even though is not going to yield a Scope should still be completed.

Despite Rue Mohr ordering it in early Dec, our Trinket Pro still haven't arrived, GRRR.

But that aside I succeeded in assembling a wearable or at least pocketable device which will record a 8khz .Wav file

The armcuff is designed! R1 anyhow :)

I dont think were gonna have this one finished for the contest deadline. We do have the code recording at 8Khz, our mic preamp works (yay). Our SD card reader boards and our trinket have not arrived yet, and its newyears, so, arg.

if nothing else, we still have a marketable project!

So I've been sick and not really in the mood for Making or Blogging the last couple weeks, but in the last 3 or 4 days Ive made some significant progress and wanted to report of our triumphs and failures so far.

Why a wearable voice recorder?, Well, why not is the short answer.

It was your typical evening and I saw this contest announced and thought "we'll if a trinket pro is just another arduino clone I'm sure Rue and I can whip something up.

I called Rue one night "so hack a day is running a new contest, Using an Arduino clone from ADAFRUIT, should be a no brainer right?, got any ideas?" Rue and I Bounced back and forth a few ideas before he came up with the voice memo recorder idea saying "you cant find, ANYWHERE, a voice recorder that does not create a new file every time you record something"

He went on to explain that for him and a bunch of guys he knows who do service tech work it would be great if they could record a long string of individual messages, over a day, into one file, which, you could later sit down and copy your days into a log book; think model numbers, times on and off site, loose ends from jobs.. that kind of thing.

seemed doable and with the abundance of open-sourced projects and examples should be doable in time for the deadline.

we decided we would need to integrate a (micro)SDcard for storage, giving the user the ability to simply remove the card and copy your memos to your pc, Or smartphone.

Perhaps we though the device may not even need to have playback ability, be nice but not required.

Geez it could be really small, like as small as a watch even. that's when we thought, well wearable tech is all the Rage, this thing could be wearable; people cant seem to get enough wearable tech, from "smart watches" that dont even really do anything or people pinning a rgb led in a shirt, people love it.

we both had a bunch of pro-minis so we decided we would prototype on them and order a Trinket for the final product, Rue also ordered the needed SD cards and adapters, some very small mp3 player batteries and a trinket pro.

After doing some research and thinking a lot about our goals our parts finally arrived and it was time to build a prototype, Always Seems simple until Murpy's law kicks in.

More Next Time.

Corey

Corry, are you ok? Please contact me...

A number of arduino projects have been perused to be used as code starters, a few possabilities, exist.

Using some m328 resources we are working on assembling some preliminary hardware, We have started ordering parts such as a memory card adapter, our, arduino, amplifers, batteries... We are also rounding up parts such as microphones and speakers, leds, let the fun commence!

We may have pins soldered to a SD card adapter before our official reader arrives...