Does anybody have any circuitry/electronics experience?

[Garacesh]

So, tl;dr my housemate just lost his job from the company he works for dissolving. Not fun. I'm looking to make him something to cheer him up.

 

He's a huge Doctor Who fan and owns a fair few Sonic Screwdriver replicas. So I figured I want to make him a device that listens for a sound to turn his PC on - you see where this is going.

 

I figure I'd need to do the following:

 

Turn IDLE USB POWER on his machine to ON, and provide power to the device from the USB pins (5v, 500mA) whilst the machine is off.

Have some kind of microphone and microcontroller. Program it to listen for the S.S. sound.

Probably connect those up to a transistor. When it hears the sound, trip the transistor, circuit is complete, PC boots up.

 

I'd likely have to manually wire things into F-Panel pins, but I'm figuring I could probably get those blank female pins online somewhere. Problem is I wouldn't have a clue where to start. Anyone know of anything similar, or any kits that would allow me to build something like this? Obviously I'll be testing it on my PC first so as not to risk blowing his up

Edited September 12, 2014 by Garacesh

[Miscbrah]

Arduino is a likely candidate for that. If anything is tbh!

 

The germ of an idea here I guess. And another here? If you could map the frequency of say the first tone this thing makes and the Arduino listens out for it, then fires up the PC upon hearing it.

 

Gawd I dunno though - that a start even?

Edited September 12, 2014 by Miscbrah

[Garacesh]

I shall take a look at those when I'm home, as link 1 is blocked (forums and all..)

[plexer]

If it has lights and I assume it does if you could replace one of them with or add on an ir led you could then use the arduino to look for the infrared.

 

Ben

[pcstru]

Can you solder?

 

I'd forget about sound triggering it - not that it can't be done but IR or RF would be much easier and the device can still make a sound, so who's to know. Arduino pro mini would be a good building block - cheap and easy to use but soldering definitely required. There's loads of cheap RF options - I've recently used RFM 12B modules for my energy/environment monitoring stuff, but I've also used some 2.4Ghz modules and bare, bang the bits 433Mhz rx/tx pairs for simple remote switching.

 

To switch a PC I think you would just need to put some kind of switch in parallel with the PC switch (relay, opto isolator, transistor). As you suggest power the PC arduino from USB, the remote would presumably have to be a battery.

[Garacesh]

If it has lights and I assume it does if you could replace one of them with or add on an ir led you could then use the arduino to look for the infrared.

 

Ben

 

It does, but only 1 standard LED so replacing it isn't really an option