arduino christmas project: GIFTUINO

I recently made this as a christmas present for a friend. it's a gift that plays audio files when it opened. I made it with an arduino, a wav audio shield, a photoresistor, a 10k ohm resistor, some wire, solder, and a little bit of pcb.

you can pick up a wav audio shield online fairly easily... order this handy shield, solder it together and the rest of this project is super simple...

You put the audio files onto an sd card as .wav files, and then you put the sd card into the wav shield. You can either download wav files or you can create your own with your favorite digital audio workstation type program.

the arduino runs code that detects the voltage from the light sensor, and based on that reading, turns the audio on and off.

The end result: a gift that says or plays whatever you want it to when its opened, and you can stop the audio and skip to the next track by closing the gift.

Below is a simple schematic that show how to build this.
you should only need 3 wires to set up the light detection.

in the pictures above, i have a white wire going to 5 volts, the brown wire going to ground, and the yellow wire going to analog input 0.

i have drawn it as red, black, and green in the diagram to the right.

Here is the code for the arduino sketch.

once you get everything wired up, have your own audio loaded on the SD card and upload the code to your arduino, you should have a very personalized gift to give. this is perfect for holidays, birthdays, special events, jokes, pranks, and sincere messages of thanks...

there are also plenty of outputs left on the arduino for controlling lightsor any other sort of bells and whistles you'd like to add to this project...

you can see it in action in the video below...

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