Sound Reactive Record Player

Final project for MTEC2250 Fabrication for Physical Computing class in Fall 2022.

Digital Fabrication | Component Design | Arduino | Electronic | Sound Reactive

Project Overview

This project is about using various fabrication techniques to design components that can be assembled to be a record player.

Since I was curious about how a record player worked. Also, I would like to have a record player even if it is just an adornment. After some researching, I considered that I don’t yet have the skills to make a functional record player. So I decided to make a record player adornment with some features of real record player and my own design ideas. It is an adornment with practical and entertainment functions.

It is a belt-driven record player that features sound reactive LED lighting effect and cell phone holder functions.

Process

1 – Initial Sketches:

2 – Inspiration Board: Listing different components for building the record player.

3 – Chipboard Prototype: Using chipboard and foam board to make a mock- up prototype.

4 – Arduino Prototype

Components include: Arduino UNO board, breadboard, motor, servo motor, sound sensor, LED strip, capacitor, transistor, diode, resistor and wires

In this step, I mainly learned how to use the DC motor, such as how to control the speed. Also, I figured out how to use the sound sensor in order to use it to control the LED strip.

5 – Building it

–Chipboard Base

–Fusion 360

Before and alongside drawing in Fusion 360, I used the mock-up model to figure out the dimension of different components.

Dimensions for drawing in Fusion 360

Digital Drawing Components in Fusion 360

–3D Printing

3D Printed Components

Arm holder(Servo Motor)

Motor holder

Cell Phone Holder

–Soldering

Test the LEDs after soldering

8 – Testing and Fixing

During the building process, there are a couples of issues need to be fixed. One of the main issue was the balance, included the weight balance of the arm holder and level balance between motor and turntable. As the videos shown below:

Weight balance issue

Level balance issue

For the weight balance issue, I tried increasing arm holder’s weight to solve this problem.

And for level balance issue, I used the mock-up model to find out the horizontal level between motor and turntable and make a new motor holder ( black one ) to fix this problem.