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NagBot Prototype - Arduino


It wasn't actually a grand success, but I should consider it a breakthrough. Inspired by my daughter's potty watch (goes off every 30 min) and by my wife's need to have things done around the house, I came up with the NagBot: a device that sends an audible reminder every 30 min.

I used Arduino breadboard setup with a sound module I got on Amazon for $3. The idea was to have the play button trigger the recorded audio (NagByte) and also a 30 min repeating loop.

I was able to get the loop up to 3 min, and sometimes the button play was cutoff by the nature of the looping mechanism. But I did demo that you can control an external device with an Arduino.

I've included in a link files for the codes I used, which contain the tech specs for the greeting card sound module and other helpful forum links I found along the way. In the end I used if, else if running BlinkWithoutDelay, else if button pushed.

Closeup of the wiring shows pin 9 (running loop) and 10 (controls button) hooked up to button circuit. Pin 5 is hooked up to LED for testing. I found a cool feature of this setup was that you could get the LED to pulse with the spoken audio (see trigger_audioLED code).

Although, I originally intended to use the NagBot for a different way of knocking out the checklist, it may actually be more suited for memorizing quotes. I did some testing with the loop using Text to Speech from @Voice (allows you to play back copied text) and the litany of chores is too monotonous to distinguish in a quick blurb.

In the documentation links below, a PDF shows some future advancements for the project, as well as having a list of items I need to still acquire to bring about the project to completion.

NagBot_Documentation

*Note: testing to see which was the lead wire for the greeting card sound module was tricky. I tried using Arduino's serial monitor but didn't work for me (I was only getting noise from my fingers). So, I tried to test on the LED (this was a happy accident; I was just playing with stuff). The lead wire for the button lit the LED, whereas the ground did not.


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