Hello all, I just found this message board last week and this is my first post. I've been fascinated with electronics since high school but I've never had any formal education. I would say my soldering skills are good but not great (I need practice!).
My hobby is repairing antique clocks and I have an idea for a project I want to build but I haven't the foggiest notion how to go about it. My hope is that someone in this community can at least guide me toward the right circuit to build my project. I want to build a diagnostic tool for "setting the beat" of an antique spring-driven or weight-driven clock. "In beat" is when the silences between the "tick" and the "tock" sound are perfectly even, and "out of beat" is when they are uneven. Such a sound is easy for someone with a strong sense of rhythm to hear, but not everyone has such a sense and it's nice to have an instrument to quantify the setting.
I want to build a handheld box containing a small audio amplifier fed by a wire with a tiny microphone or pickup at the end. The mic would be placed next to the escapement mechanism (the source of the tick-tock sound), and the mic's signal would in turn trigger a series of LED's. I'm envisioning a single row of 7 or so LED's, with the center one green for "perfectly in beat" and the ones on the left or right would pulse another color when the beat is close, but not perfect.
I have other design details I'd like to include, but those could be enumerated later. The above is my basic idea. It needs to be inexpensive, above all other considerations. I'm not seeking to patent anything or make a million bucks off this idea because it's already been done by at least two manufacturers - I just want to make a "poor man's version" of this product: http://www.bmumford.com/mset/specs.html . One detail I'd like to build into my box would be a miniature noise gate between the mic and the signal processor so that the mic would be impervious to ambient noise.
Can anyone point me to what kind of circuit would take a signal from a mic and make it drive a series of LED's in the manner described above? Hopefully I've been clear, but maybe I haven't been.
Thank you in advance,
Doug H.
My hobby is repairing antique clocks and I have an idea for a project I want to build but I haven't the foggiest notion how to go about it. My hope is that someone in this community can at least guide me toward the right circuit to build my project. I want to build a diagnostic tool for "setting the beat" of an antique spring-driven or weight-driven clock. "In beat" is when the silences between the "tick" and the "tock" sound are perfectly even, and "out of beat" is when they are uneven. Such a sound is easy for someone with a strong sense of rhythm to hear, but not everyone has such a sense and it's nice to have an instrument to quantify the setting.
I want to build a handheld box containing a small audio amplifier fed by a wire with a tiny microphone or pickup at the end. The mic would be placed next to the escapement mechanism (the source of the tick-tock sound), and the mic's signal would in turn trigger a series of LED's. I'm envisioning a single row of 7 or so LED's, with the center one green for "perfectly in beat" and the ones on the left or right would pulse another color when the beat is close, but not perfect.
I have other design details I'd like to include, but those could be enumerated later. The above is my basic idea. It needs to be inexpensive, above all other considerations. I'm not seeking to patent anything or make a million bucks off this idea because it's already been done by at least two manufacturers - I just want to make a "poor man's version" of this product: http://www.bmumford.com/mset/specs.html . One detail I'd like to build into my box would be a miniature noise gate between the mic and the signal processor so that the mic would be impervious to ambient noise.
Can anyone point me to what kind of circuit would take a signal from a mic and make it drive a series of LED's in the manner described above? Hopefully I've been clear, but maybe I haven't been.
Thank you in advance,
Doug H.