The Party Box

Have the vibes been lacking at the parties you've been to lately (*claremont*)?

Don't worry! We've got the solution for you!

With this instructable you can single-handedly save a mediocre party from awkward oblivion...

The Party Box (A.K.A "The Vibenator") comes equipped with lasers, smoke, and a motorised disco ball that are all designed to respond to noise-level inputs. We use two Arduino controllers and two microphone sensors to instruct our lasers, motor, and smoke machine to turn on.

1) A Very Sturdy Disco Ball (sturdy is crucial!)

2) 4x Laser Diode - 5mW 650nm Red (or more!)

3) 2x Arduino compatible microphone sensor

4) Breadboards (all you need is sufficient space to wire up the circuit... a few small breadboards might be more convenient positioning-wise)

5) 7.2V Battery Supply and a fuse! (and 2x connectors)

6) Arduino motor driver and motor

7) Relay (to replace switch on smoke machine)

8) Switches, wires, soldering iron, pins, misc. electronics materials (depending on the needs of your final design)

9) A smoke machine (if you can get your hands on one!)

10) A box or capability to 3D-print a housing for the party box

You can build an appropriate power supply by soldering your power connectors to your rechargeable power pack (keep in mind which wires are ground and hot). You can add a fuse for safety on the hot side after the recharging connection (see image, orange circle), followed by a set of switches that independently deliver power to your Arduino controllers AND the motor driver to make it more convenient (lasers and motor will have different power switches... also see image, blue circle). You will want to solder pins to all your ground wires (including those on the Arduino power connectors) so that you can set them to a common ground on your breadboard.

Connect "VCC" to the 5V pin on your Arduino and "GND" to the ground pin beside it.

Connect "OUT" to digital pin 3 or whatever you'd like to specify in the code.

Program your first Arduino using this script to teach it how to respond to noise-inputs (you can tweak the parameters if you want).

Now that you have the Arduino controller connected to the microphone, you can start adding the fun components!

First, we can connect the lasers by connecting digital pin 6 on our Arduino to a point on our breadboard. From here, we can connect our 4 (or more!) lasers in parallel, and we ground them to the common ground we set earlier. Easy!

Once we get the lasers working, we can hook up the motor for our disco ball!

To do this, we connect digital pin 8 to "IN1" and digital pin 7 to "IN2".

We need to power the driver and we can do so by connecting the pin we soldered onto one of our switches earlier to "VCC" and "GND" to the common ground.

To connect to our motor, we use "OUT1" and "OUT2" and wire them to the motor terminals!

Similarly, connect "VCC" to the 5V pin on your Arduino and "GND" to the ground pin beside it.

Connect "OUT" to digital pin 3 or whatever you'd like to specify in the code.

This step will be dependent on the type of smoke machine you are able to find.

My smoke machine was operated by a switch (button) that you could press to trigger the smoke so I decided that it would be appropriate to replace this switch with an Arduino-driven relay.

To do this I removed the switch and soldered wires onto the part of the circuit that the switch had been occupying, then from here I connected the wires to the relay (see images) and also connected the Arduino to the relay.

You should connect digital pin 10 (as per the code) to one of the inner legs of the relay and "GND" to the other leg.

The outer legs should be connected to the wires we've added to our modified "switch"

You can use this Autodesk Fusion design or come up with your own ideas to house the party box!

(if you use this design you will want to drill two holes to install your microphone depending on how your components

decide to fit into the box)

ANOTHER IMPORTANT NOTE: You can tune the sensitivity of the microphone using the obvious potentiometer on them!