My first milestone is :” Build circuits to make sounds first and then try to the recognition part”.

In the first two week, I tried the circuits to make sound at certain pitch. The circuit I use is the 555 timer circuits, by changing the resistor, the frequency of the signal of out put can be changed.

After building the below circuits successfully on bread board, the sound is not perfect, I add a low pass filter but it helps little. So I plan to solve this problem by mechanical way.

I soldering the circuits on proto board and add photo sensor and a switch. The photo sensor is in order to support the idea that by changing the cube’s up-face to change cube mode (i.e. # b ). As show in the video below, I also try to use different material covering on the speaker to get better audio effect. I’ll also keep trying other kinds of circuits to solve this.

About battery: the size of battery will limits my cubes size, so I plan to use use this one: www.sparkfun.com/products/341

2013-10-28 21.17.07 from Wanfang Diao on Vimeo.

Material

I have laser cut a wooden cube which is 5.5cm*5.5cm*5.5cm, but I feel the material is not cute enough.

So I plan to try more flexible materiel like image below which is silicone. I want the cube to feel like jelly.

I also realize that before I design the mother mold for silicone cube I have to decide the final electronic part design.