The Sound of Sirens

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Drawings


Examples of other work


MVP. We built a disc with evenly spaced holes attached to a rotating motor and a 9V battery. Blowing on the spinning disc does indeed produce pitch! The motor was rather noisy until we figured out a position to squeeze it (near the top) that makes it virtually silent. Then, we iterated, and attached a potentiometer (fader) to control the voltage.


The Plan. We want to build a "siren organ" with some faders to control rotational speed of the motor(s) (frequency), other faders to control the applied air pressure (volume), and buttons to control solenoid valves to turn the sirens on/off.


Unlimited Resources Vision. It's more about unlimited money than time--I think we can achieve something cool. We're ditching the bike idea, I think.


Elevator Pitch


Materials Needed
motors (5, one for each disk)
tubes/air hose (10)
solenoid valves (10):
* 7psi model (might need more): http://www.jameco.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Product_10001_10001_169835_-1
* air directional control valves: http://www.mcmaster.com/#air-directional-control-valves/=p6xufn
arduino (1)
power source (1?)
keys/piano/organ interface (faders + buttons + enclosure)
disks (5)
enclosures for the disks (5)
horns? (5)


Next Steps. The next steps are to build a 5-fader, 4-button, 1-motor model, where 4 faders are devoted to air hoses over the individual rings of 1 disk (different pitches) and control the air pressure of each hose, and 1 fader is dedicated to the spin of the motor. The 4 faders could possibly control ball valves to partially open/close the air hoses as opposed to flow, which we do not have a good grasp of how to control (cheaply; a regulator might work). The buttons could also serve as the valve control, or could power on/off the air supply.