Some months back a friend of mine, Mark Hernandez passed away. Mark was a smart, funny and strange guy. He was also active with KFCF in Fresno and KPFA in Berkeley. I was disappointed that there wasn’t a memorial (or one I heard about) for him. I started to work on an “art piece” that I think Mark would have liked.
Fortunately, we have audio of Mark from KFCF’s RPU program that was broadcast in the 1980s. I took a number of cuts of the audio from the “show” and put them on an SSD card, put that on an MP3 shield for a Mega Arduino board. Stuck the electronics in a box that I painted “urn” gold and put a lit button on it. Whenever you push the button, you get silly audio of Mark cut played back.
I started off with a 6 sided (hexagon) box where the edges are routed so they slip into each other. Below you can see the joint corner.
I wanted the box to look pretty simple so I hid the power connector in the back and the speaker is on the bottom with a bit of wood for feet to lift the box about 1/4 inch off the surface it is sitting on to not muffle the sound.
Inside the box you can see the Arduino Mega with the MP3 shield, speaker under the blue tape and cable to the button and power connector.
The completed box after painting it gold to look a bit like an urn…
Here is a quick and small video of it doing its thing.
The hacky source that I really should clean up can be found at https://github.com/pozar/mark_in_a_box. The parts list can be found in the Docs directory.