Digital Sound with Haunt Timer Control - Aug. 2000
Several List members have recently purchased the 20 second digital voice recorder ( 276-1326), from the last remaining stock of Radio-Shack, as well as their battery powered monaural speaker (32-2040). Some have asked for specific instructions as to how to modify and connect the digital sound recorder to the speaker. Still others wanted to know how this combo would then be connected to a haunt timer for a complete sound and prop control system. The following attempts to answer these questions.
You may want to mount your digital recorder in an enclosure (box). But for ease of explanation and a minimum of labor it'll be shown unenclosed. First of all, you will need a soldering iron and some rosin core solder as well as some small gauge (22 or so) stranded wire. Although single wires are shown in photos, # 22 speaker wire at R-S will have two wires together. This works nicely since two wires are always used to interconnect everything in this project.
Finally you'll need to purchase a monaural "mini-plug" at R-S so that the sound from the digital recorder can be plugged into the AUX jack at the back of the amplified speaker. Solder two wires to it and solder the other ends of these two wires to the two speaker wire "solder mounds" on the circuit board.
The other ends of the two wires from the mini-plug are soldered to the existing "solder mounds" of the two speaker wires. There is no polarity. That means: it doesn't matter which wire of the two goes to which solder mound. In the above photo the two black wires from the mini-plug are shown soldered to the same mounds as the two red wires from speaker.
Also solder two trigger wires (shown in yellow) to the two solder mounds of the "Play" push button. These two wires will terminate in an inch of bare wire (insulation removed). The overall length of the added wires is dependent on your application; I'd recommend at least two feet of length for the sound wires (black in photo), and at least six feet for the trigger wires (yellow in photo).
Congratulations! At this point you've made all the wiring additions needed to form a portable haunt sound system which may be triggered, in addition to the manual "play" buttton, by an external switch connected to the two yellow wires.
To check your work, put batteries in both digital recorder and speaker and plug the mini-plug into the AUX jack of the speaker. Then push and hold the white membrane switch while you speak into the small microphone. When the red LED goes out, the 20 second recording time has ended. Now to play back, just turn the volume control of the speaker clockwise. It should "click on"- rotate this knob about half way to its maximum position. Then momentarily touch the two bare ends of the trigger wires. You should hear the amplified 20-sec sound through the speaker.
- end part one -
If would like to see just how all connections are made from this digital sound system to a haunt timer and sensor so that everything, prop and sound, will be controlled automatically Click Here. Note that this explanation involves the products sold by just one vendor Haunt Master Products, Inc.