Building A Museum Listening Station? 251
Anonymous Coward writes "I am building a museum exhibit which requires the use of 10 listening stations. These should be able to play back a few minutes of audio, should have an obvious Play button (and no other buttons: less confusion for the elderly and less to break for the kids), and should be able to work with an absolute minimum of supervision for three months of constant use. There are fancy ready-made solutions to this problem, but at $350, it would be too expensive to buy 10 of them. Similarly, there are cheap solutions ($20 CD player + $15 headphones), but this is probably not reliable or user friendly enough for this exhibit. Does the Slashdot community have any suggestions for how to build a reasonably inexpensive museum listening station?"
Use a computer (Score:2, Informative)
Hope this helps
CD player works great (Score:5, Informative)
I'd invest in a large sheath that will cover and protect the headphone cables and invest in heavy duty headphones. Probably total cost would be about
10 x 15.00 150 for the CD players
20 x
10 x 20.00 200 for good sturdy headphones that can stand the abuse
20 x 6.00 120 for heavy duty switches to wire into said CD players
75 miscellaneous parts, wires, drill bits wood etc for you stations.
Total cost 553 or their abouts. Remember, don't skimp on bad switches that can't take a pounding. Also get your museum's tax ID for your purchases so most places you don't have to pay sales tax for a non-profit.
Problems - most CD players the play is also a "pause" button. My old CD player here isn't - so if you can find them with play and pause as seperate buttons, your golden. Also soldering the switches on the landing pads requires some patience - but if I can do it - any one can.
cluge
Funny, I just had to build something like this. (Score:5, Informative)
Our solution cost about $60.00 with the wood for the case, the CD player was bought at best buy, and has been running flawlessly for 6 months now.
-GReg
Re:Listening posts. (Score:3, Informative)
Thinking about it, if you had a PC with 5 PCI slots you could put 5 Soundblaster Lives in it. They are about $20 each.
That would give ten mono headphone feeds off the sound card's lil heaphone amps.
I don't think anyone has tried this under ALSA yet... but in theory it should work.
One interesting thing about using Pure-Data and a
PC for this is that you could collect statistics. You could also do real time effects, or announcements that would go to to all the headphones at once.
It would bring the cost down to around $300. (A delta 1010 is overkill for this job.)
It depends on your definition of "build" (Score:2, Informative)
Over 20 Years in the Museum Exhibit field (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why not one that does 10 stations or more? (Score:2, Informative)
Pro's: easy to maintain, easy to update, minimal cost.
Con's: If you don't know what you are doing it could be difficult to set up (especialy the "Play" button). Computer would need a lot of RAM (depending on length of presentation). With that particular piece of hardware (Delta 410) all outputs would be mono, and also would not be amplified.
Re:Build one yourself from old computers. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:All about user interface (Score:5, Informative)
for 30 dollars complete with actual wire terminals etc.
try http://electronickits.com/kit/complete/audi/ck121
link [electronickits.com]
POTS phones, old = 10 line PBX, voice mail (Score:2, Informative)
Here is exactly what we did (Score:2, Informative)
1.) Set of powered speakers. We're using the Edirol MA-10's because everything is self contained. There's no AC brick, and they come with all the necessary cables. Very good audio quality.
2.) CD Drive in an external case. The simpler the case, the better. It's only job is to supply power to the drive. If you can get one that has its own power socket, so much the better. You can just plug the speakers into it, and plug the drive into the wall. The important part is, the drive MUST HAVE A PLAY BUTTON, not just an eject button. Only drives with a play button will work.
3.) CD with audio. Record your message, burn it as an audio CD. One track only.
4.) Solder, wire, and a switch. Take apart the front plastic on the CD drive, and see where the play button is soldered in. A little experimenting will show you where to solder the wire in. The switch should be of the momentary contact sort, like a doorbell switch, not the push-on, push-off kind.
That's it. Plug the audio-jack from the CD drive into the speakers, insert the CD, hit the switch, and adjust your audio using both the volume at the drive and at the speakers. We liked this solution because it was cheap, it was low maintenance, and it was distribution-tolerant. The only system-wide failure could be the power.
Re:Why not one that does 10 stations or more? (Score:2, Informative)
Look here [iweb.net.au].
A similar device, maybe? (Score:4, Informative)
It was fairly simple. The only moving parts, aside from the displays, was the "start" switch. Nothing to break, no motors to worry over, no lenses to fret about. Radio Shack has these chips, too, so you can get them fairly cheaply, and they work quite well (years ago, I used one of these to "hack" into a "closed" 440mhz repeater near McHenry, by digitally recording the "activation" sequence on the input side, and wiring the playback through the microphone of the "pirate" radio. Pretty slick, if I must say so myself
Yes, it can be done on the cheap. (Score:4, Informative)
Shameless Plug (Score:1, Informative)
Alternatively, you can buy a rather nice product that does precisely that (in stereo, too!) See www.purestereo.com [purestereo.com]
Apologies for the page layout, but I'm an engineer, not a webmaster.
It sounds like the original poster is looking for a much cheaper solution than anything we offer, though. Expect a professionally built custom solution to cost somewhere between a few hundred to a thousand dollars per station, depending on how fancy you want it to be. Building ten or twenty custom units for less than $100 each just isn't going to be worth the time for anyone who needs to work for a living, no matter how simple your requirements.
Hacking together a simple listening station isn't that hard - making it look nice and work reliably, as well as having support available when things go wrong (When you build a custom product for someone else to assemble, things _always_ go wrong) - that is what costs money.
Re:No, it can't be done on the cheap. (Score:2, Informative)
That equipment sounds nice, but it's not very relevant to the OP's needs. He/she is building listening stations. The equipment is fixed in position so the complicated bits - the CD-players, computers of what have you - don't need to be rugged like the handsets in your museum. They can be put in cabinets to protect them from the proles.
Using consumer-grade CD players, MP3 players, and headphones for a museum exhibit is like replacing a pay phone outside of a convenience store with a $10 phone from Walmart.
The electronics inside of the payphone are not likely to be much more rugged than the electronics inside of the walmart phone. A CD-player may eventually wear out (moving parts) but an MP3 player should last virtually forever.
I agree any interfaces (headphones, buttons) would have to be rugged.
I have little experience of running more than one sound-card under Linux, but my first approach would be to see how many soundcards I could fit in a 200mhz box (I've several lying around). If it wasn't for the fact that the audio needs to start & stop (e.g. if it could just be looped) I'd be tempted to drive two mono headphones from each stereo soundcard, each playing an entirely different track.
Do you need to cater for people with hearing aids (e.g. installing loop systems).
Also think about hackability. Will you move on and leave the museum people with a system that they don't understand and can't modify or repair? If I used the PC approach, I would be tempted to burn the software onto a bootable CD-rom. That way, even if the hard-disks crash and the computers die, someone savvy will probably be able to build a replacement machine. Document everything you do, explaining precisely how it works.
Quality of CD players - Speaking from experience (Score:3, Informative)
It'll stand up just fine. (Score:2, Informative)
Three months, no problem.
Re:Quality of CD players - Speaking from experienc (Score:3, Informative)
From an old exhibit designer... (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.happcontrols.com/
They sell video game / amusement parts, and we used to buy all of our controls from them. They just don't break, even with a hundred eight-year-olds slamming their fists into them for six hours each day.
As for the electronics themselves, there's a right way and there's a cheap way. The right way is to use something like the Radio Design Labs FP-MR1 [rdlnet.com], which is a bulletproof digital message repeater. It's exactly what you want, but it's $225 each. The cheap way is to try and find a CD player or MP3 player that can boot up right into behaving the way you want -- either repesting all the time with the big button wired to the "forward" button or playing then pausing, with the big button wired to the "play" button. Unfortunately, it's likely on the CD player side that the only players that will do what you want will be pro models, and will cost several hundred dollars each.
Good luck!
Re:Quality of CD players - Speaking from experienc (Score:2, Informative)