Someone shared this earlier. Click for the full-size image.
Pull this crap on me and here’s my response:
Hidden Arduino hooked to a speaker. Do a little program to fire off the car alarm sound at random intervals every few minutes. Then it can go on all night long and it isn’t coming from your car.
The whole package can be shrunk down to the size of a man’s fist if you really want, but you’ll probably want a bigger and more powerful speaker. If you want to get really fancy, you can stick it in an industrial grade waterproof casing so it can stay out year-round and use a power adapter so you don’t burn through batteries.
Or if you want to go balls to the wall, find a PA speaker and wire it into that. You not only get a nice speaker made for high volume, but you can steal power from it! Obviously I would never recommend such a callous, criminal act. That would be wrong and give you all kinds of spiritual crustiness.
I just happen to own a few NEMA-4 rated casings, and I know for a fact my work can survive for years in farm fields and industrial settings. It’s only what I do for a living.
Try me, Karen.
Just FYI: using a knockoff Arduino board and cheap speaker you can do the whole base product for around $30.
- The Arduino knockoff will run you $5-10. You might also need a MicroSD card adapter depending on your Arduino board.
- A tiny MicroSD card will run you a couple bucks. The place I go for electronics parts has them at every register along with jump drives.
- An OK speaker maybe another $10 or so
- The power converter is another $5. Just buy a cheap phone charger brick with the 1A and 2.4A USB sockets; they’re usually $5 at Target or Wal-Mart. You might get lucky at the dollar store too.
- You’ll also need a little piece of perfboard and a few cheap parts (resistor and transistor, some jumper wire and wire leads). I didn’t price these out because I usually have this stuff at Devil Monkey Laboratories.
- Cheap weatherproofing will cost you a $5 tube of silicone glue.
Obviously these prices assume you do all the work yourself and make a trip to Ax-Man or a similar surplus parts store.
Salvage can drop it down to almost nothing: We all have an old radio or set of stereo speakers lying around, likewise with the phone charger. I know we usually have a few tubes of silicone glue in the garage.
Who doesn’t have at least one old MicroSD card gathering dust somewhere from when they upgraded the card in their phone? However tiny and useless it was in that application, it’ll be overkill for this.
The only parts a layman would really likely have to buy are the Arduino and electronic parts.
As for labor, we’re talking an hour or two tops, plus time for the silicone to dry. Building the circuit is a 15-minute job with a breadboard, an hour with perfboard including time to lay out the circuit on paper beforehand so you don’t have to desolder everything and rebuild it when you realize you screwed something up. Converting the phone charger to run the Arduino is another fifteen minutes. Gluing it all together with the silicone is another hour including letting parts of it dry partially so when you stack things together you don’t get shorts. Then just let it dry overnight to be safe.
Programming it might take an hour or so, including the time to convert the car lock sound to a .WAV file and stick it on the MicroSD card. Make sure you have the program loaded on your Arduino and it works before you start gluing stuff together! You’ll be sealing the USB port on the Arduino to waterproof it, and that’ll make it a royal PITA to reprogram later.
So for $30 and an afternoon of work you can royally annoy this Karen right back.