Michele Christle | Millet Jet | Feb 6, 2007 | image from flickr		AKA MEDIA SYSTEM - CAMEROON PROJECT Please help me make this! My friend Michele is in Bame, Cameroon for two years as part of a Peace Corps project. Each week she sends a hypnotic, elegant summary of her work thus far, accompanied by regular updates on her flickr set. I've become hopelessly attached to the kids in her village, who make all manner of neat toys out of materials found around the village. My favorite are the stilts you can see here. I decided it would be a good idea to build a simple little audiotoy to send them—something that would be rechargeable (solar or crank are the main candidates), adorable, and intuitively usable. This'll help me learn some hardware stuff I've been putting off as well as present a pretty interesting desgin challenge. TO SUMMARIZE: USER INTERFACE    This has yet to be determined, but it must be rugged. I'm thinking momentary SPST for most functions right now, with some LEDs for visaul feedback. The kids probably won't be reading or writing much, so I'm hoping button placement will circumvent the need for labels or instructions. Also, I don't speak much French or any other local languages. FUNCTIONS    I want the toy to be loveable and easily understandable—no second-level functions or learning curve. I think the easiest, most universal reaction to sound that can be leveraged here is the "that's me!" moment of recognition.    Pressing a button and hearing your own voice is a magical, prelingual, and something a cheap chip can do. If some additional controls could toggle loop on/off and if the pitch could shift, this would be a plus. The pie-in-the-sky feature I'd like to see (but likely won't have time to implement) is polyphony—if you could make a two- or three-part choir of separately sampled, separately tunable sounds, it'd be rad! FORM FACTOR    I mean, some sort of adorable animal would be just great. Functionally, it has to be easy to recharge (again, by solar, crank, shaking, etc), durable enough to withstand chidren and bad weather, and small enough to be reasonably inexpensive to ship. TIMEFRAME    I intend to have this ready for when Michele comes to visit around Christmas, 2007. WHY DON'T YOU HELP    Damn, I need your help. With just about everything. Here are some bite-sized tasks:    Flesh out the form factor. What materials, how to assemble, what animal (maybe I already decided it's a goat)?    Power. I need a way to charge some capacitors so we can power a ~3v chip and small speaker for at least 10 minutes before recharging. How will it recharge? Can I just lift the whole mechanism from a cheap squeeze flashlight or crankable toy?    Circuit design. You can find the spec sheet of the chip I'm planning to order from Jameco (DigiKey doesn't stock any voice chips, grrrr), but if you find something better then let me know! I need to make a power supply module, a breakout board for the chip-to-button connections (which should be replaceable, ideally), and am I forgetting anything? RELATED DATA: Voice chip I'm likely to use (PDF spec sheet from Jameco) my del.icio.us tag for useful resources Michele's flickr set flickr del.icio.us youtube

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