Would it be easy to make a half-hour timer that emitted a soft ping when the half-hour was up? I thought it might be useful to signal the end of a period of meditation. It's not important at all - and might be fun to do. Any ideas?
I read that as:- "a period of medication"... ;-)
Dead easy!
Stick a coin or such in the side of a burning candle, candle standing on a tin plate, so that it falls out after about half an hour...
Thomas Prufer
Very easy to do electronically - there are a big selection of sound generators on the market. Or even to use a sample of exactly what you want.
My choice would be a suitable piano chord.
Many mobile phones have diaries/event reminders and user settable tones.
Another way......
Find the sound that you like somewhere on the internet
Burn it to an audio CD (or tape of you prefer), preceded by 30 minutes of silence (freebie software around to let you do the audio editing side of things)
Start the CD when you start your meditation..... ....sound is played 30 minutes later....
Hope this helps Adrian
Nice idea. Better still, have 5 silent tracks each 10 minutes long and 1 track of 10 minutes ending with the chime.
In message , OG writes
Then slip in another CD with 5 silent tracks and a violent rock track and turn the volume up full.
Or program a PIC microcontroller with a button for each 10 minute increment and a simple DAC to create a soft chordy gong noise in software. Bit harder than a CD though.
The person who posted the "5 silent tracks and a chime" idea should consider that this is exactly the sort of thing that would sell to hippies on ebay.
I wonder how much silence can be stored on a CD with standard audio compression.
Beware violating copyright, though....
Thomas Prufer
Now you're getting complicated ! Adrian
Not kind !
Ahem ! The idea for 'x mins silence + a sound' actually came from the Spiritualist Church I used to work for in Ipswich.
Our Saturday services were a fairly standard, 'prayers, hymns and mediumship' format - but on Sundays the format included a (slient) 'Healing minute' which finished with a chord on the organ, before a particular hymn was sung.
In order to give the long-suffering organist the occasional weekend off, we recorded her playing a number of hymns, and 'Goldwaved' these onto CDRs. A little pic-based cirsuit from Elektor (Pandora's box) allowed a standard PC CDROM drive to play the tracks for a service in the right order, and by pressing only one 'big red button'.
So - that's where the idea of 'a minute's silence followed by a chord' came from.....
....and 'no' - the congregation were not all 'hippies'
Regards Adrian
In message , Clive Mitchell writes
Philistine, audio compression is usually lossy so it'd affect the dynamic range and subsonic clarity. For HiFi quality it needs to be pressed on new vinyl that's only been handled by a 40 year old virgin in an oxygen free environment, or summat like....
Great! Then you'd have the option of putting the player on shuffle, to get a random delay.
Makes no difference if it's a CD. Compact Disc Digital Audio has a red book which defines the standard - including maximum length. Once you use data compression it is no longer a CD. ;-)
To do the job properly, you'd want to carefully arrange the track lengths to give a wide range of time periods. For example, ten tracks each of four minutes, two minutes, one minute, and thirty seconds. A total of 40 tracks, time range 0:30 to 75:00. No doubt this scheme could be improved on.
Then you'd need to provide a table to look up the starting track number based on the time required. And hope your customers weren't too spaced out to understand it.
You might have to pay a royalty for the silent tracks. See
In message , Adrian writes
I built that! It worked pretty well.
Batt did.
He changed his mind and said that it was co-composed by Mikle Batt and an alias of his - Clint Cage!
Yes - didn't it ?
I looked at re-engineering it to make it a bit more 'user-friendly' (or 'idiot-proof' !) . In the application I had it would have been good to have the CD index read every time a new CD was inserted, rather than just at power-on, and it would have been reassuring to have a big green 'I'm ready to play' light and a comforting yellow 'I'm playing' light - but in the end I never got the necessary round tuit.
There were reports of unreliability on my unut which we eventually traced to the CD-Rom drive iteslf - which was very 2nd-hand when we installed it. Put in a new drive and (so far) reports are good !
Neat piece of kit..... Also thought about making it really clever, along the lines of a 'jukebox' - where you could create a playlist,,, but that idea also perished for want of round tuits...
Regards Adrian
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