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[roadking]

I want to put a boom box outside to play Halloween music when someone walks by.  I was planning to use an Eagle Eye motion sensor and an AM14A appliance module to control power and start the music.  The problem is that every boombox I have looked at will not start when the power is turned on.  You have to press the "play" button. 

Has anyone found a better way to motion activate Halloween music?

[Oldtimer]

I haven't tried this so it's just a theoretical suggestion.  If your boom box has an external audio input what about plugging in a Walkman type CD player that is powered from a wall wart instead of batteries and set the Walkman for continuous play.  Then whenever you turn on the boom box you should get instant Halloween music or sound effects.  Obviously other combinations of equipment could achieve the same result.

[-Bill- (of wgjohns.com)]

If you're talking about playing a CD for the music, I suspect it will be VERY difficult to find a CD player that allows powering up in the play mode.

How about recording the music to a cassette and using an old cassette player?  Lots of those would power up and play if the (mechanical) play button was already down.

Another idea would be to use one of the adapters they sell to broadcast the output of your CD player to your car radio.  Put the CD player on loop, repeat, etc. then plug a radio into an X10 appliance module, tune it in to the signal from the adapter, set the volume and turn the radio on and off with the motion sensor signal.  Probably have to be an older radio with manual tuning, but who wants to leave a "good" one outside anyway.   

[Puck]

You could use a VCR Commander programmed with a CD player's IR pause command for both start & stop.
Only downfall is the uncontrollable 5 minute resettable timer.

[Charles Sullivan]

To avoid all the possible hassles involved when adding additional components, the first thing I'd do is look inside the boombox to see if there a reasonable way of connecting a pair of wires across the "Play" switch, either with clip leads or by soldering.  If so, then run the wires out to the contacts on a UM506 Universal Module.

If no easy connection to the Play switch, then look into opening the wire to one speaker and use the UM506 to make or break that  connection.  (Presuming the boombox has a Balance control which can shift all the sound to that one speaker.)

[HA Dave]

  Forget the boombox and use PC speakers.

  Convert the mini plug to RCA plugs. Use a video receiver ...or just run headpone extention wire to inside... or even just "rig" speaker wire.

  Set the motion sensor to activate an appliance module. Inside, plug your CD (or DVD) player into the appliance module. with the CD in the player tape down the "play" button on the remote control.

[DeltaNu1142]

  Forget the boombox and use PC speakers.
  Convert the mini plug to RCA plugs. Use a video receiver ...or just run headpone extention wire to inside... or even just "rig" speaker wire.
  Set the motion sensor to activate an appliance module. Inside, plug your CD (or DVD) player into the appliance module. with the CD in the player tape down the "play" button on the remote control.

Here's my solution--I haven't implemented it yet, but I thought of this yesterday & with some tweaking & some time I think I can get it working.  For the window next to my front door:

1) Darken the room behind the window.
2) Hang a spooky body/mask/ghost on the interior side of the window.
3) Point a strobe light up towards the figure inside the room.
4) On my MP3 player, set up a playlist of scream sound effects, looped indefinitely.
5) Plug PC speakers and strobe light into appliance module(s) addressed to A1 (for example).
6) When guests approach the front door, motion sensor A1 will trigger the speakers on LOUD and the strobe light, to (hopefully) simultaneously switch both on & scare the bejeezus out of my friends.  This will also be captured on the wireless camera, which I already have set up.

The fog machine & strobe lights are on the way, I just need to do some messing around with my setup.  This is mainly for party guests, who will probably be arriving in pairs.  I have every intention of watching my guests on TV as they approach my door through the fog

[HA Dave]

You know..... this doesn't sound so different from what I've done with my BVC voice announcements. Check out my YouTube video from my Site (you can view it there without joining YouTube.

Hummmmm.... X10 is having a halloween ideas contest......

[billallyn]

This could be used to control halloween music.

Ok... This took me awhile. I found a workaround to have BXVC or AHP or remotes play mp3s or Winamp playlists, and access commands within Winamp. And it's free! And, I can now start winamp and access winamp commands via my RCA remote (RC1310A), as another benefit. I heard you guys talking about this subject and I knew it must be possible somehow... So...

There is a free command line interface for Winamp called, not too surprisingly, CLAmp (http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Audio/Other-AUDIO-Tools/CLAMP.shtml) [it's a small program, 116kb--I put it in my windows directory so it would be in my "path"--I think?].

Now when I say "Music, Maestro!", BXVC sends a command to AHP, which executes a macro, which executes a very simple batch file I wrote, which starts winamp (via the command line interface), turns on random play, clears the current playlist, opens a playlist of my choosing, selects a random song, plays it (and then the rest of the songs, randomly, of course), and then minimizes winamp. Man, I'm glad my computer now does this for me--I'm out of breath just typing it!

And when I say, "Next song, Hal" ("Hal" is the name of my computer in BXVC, named after Hal 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey), BXVC sends a command to AHP, which executes a macro, which executes my "next.bat" batch file, which tells CLAmp to tell Winamp to start the next (random, or not...) song. Takes about 2-3 seconds on my Pentium III 600. Of course, if you have your music up loud, you can pretty much forget issuing ANY commands at that point.  Where is Bill's Mind Commander?  LMAO!!! She's in the kitchen, cooking Bill breakfast...

Yes, it's a bit of a convoluted way of doing things, since you must program BXVC, an AHP macro, and create a batch file (well, three or four, maybe). But each part is really very quick, easy, and painless.

I did have a couple problems, though, but they were solved fairly easily.

One problem was that, while Winamp would open the playlist and play the songs randomly, the FIRST song would always be the first song in the playlist (always the same song), and I didn't want that! No matter what I did, it would not play a random first song!!! So, I created a 1 second silent mp3, and used that as the first song in my playlist. Viola! First song is now always random.

Another problem was that in the batch file I couldn't get it to clear the playlist first, and then load a new list (which is odd because both commands worked fine by themselves...). So I actually made three batch files, and used an AHP macro to run them in succession (without adding any delay). Works perfectly now. It looked something like this:

001.bat contains:
@ECHO OFF
CLAMP /START

002.bat contains:
@ECHO OFF
CLAMP /PLCLEAR

003.bat contains:
@ECHO OFF
clamp /load "d:\bands\database\orig_mp3s\bill01.m3u" /random=1 /play /minimize

next.bat contains:
@ECHO OFF
clamp /next

Available Winamp commands via CLAmp:

Usage

CLAMP {Options}

It is (sometimes) possible to perform more than one task at a time by adding multiple options on the same line.
Each option must be preceeded by /

Upon success, program will quit with an exit code of 0.
Upon failure, exit code will be set to 1.


Program Control
START ............ Start Winamp
QUIT ............ Exit Winamp

Note : any following option will automatically start winamp if necessary - No need to use /START as first option.

General Control
PLAY ............ Play (current file) - Quits Stopped or Pause mode
STOP ............ Stop playing
STOPFADE ............ Stop playing with fadout
STOPAFTER ............ Stop playing after current track (returns now, stops later)
PAUSE ............ Toggle pause mode
PLAYPAUSE ............ Same as above
NEXT ............ Play next song
PREV ............ Play previous song
FWD ............ Forward 5 seconds
FORWARD ............ Same as above
REW ............ Rewind 5 seconds
REWIND ............ Same as above
RESTART ............ Restart current track from beginning (not working with Winamp 2)


Winamp Modes
REPEAT ............ Toggle Repeat mode
SWREPEAT ............ Same as above
REPEAT ON ............ Set Repeat mode ON
REPEAT=1 ............ Same as above
REPEAT OFF ............ Set Repeat mode OFF
REPEAT=0 ............ Same as above
RANDOM ............ Toggle Random mode
RANDOM ON ............ Set Random mode ON
RANDOM=1 ............ Same as above
RANDOM OFF ............ Set Random mode OFF
RANDOM=0 ............ Same as above


PlayList Control
PLADD ............ Add file(s) to end of playlist (like drag-n-drop)
LOAD ............ Same as above
PLCLEAR ............ Clear Playlist
CLEAR ............ Same as above
PL ............ Show/Hide Winamp Playlist window
PLWIN ............ Same as above
PLPOS ............ Query Playlist position
PLFIRST ............ Play first item of playlist
PLLAST ............ Play last item of playlist


Volume Control
VOLUP ............ Volume up
VOLDN ............ Volume down
VOLSET ............ Volume set (scale 0-255)
VOLMAX ............ Volume max
VOLMIN ............ Volume min (mute)


Infos
POS ............ Query current position in file and track length
POSITION ............ Query current position in file only
STATE ............ Query current state (PLAYING;PAUSED;STOPPED;NOT RUNNING)
STATUS ............ Synonym for STATE
TITLE ............ Query current track title
VER ............ Query Winamp version


Winamp Interactive Windows
ABOUT ............ Display Winamp About window
PREFS ............ Display Winamp Preferences window
OPEN ............ Display Winamp Open File window


Equalizer Control
EQWIN ............ Toggle Eq window (Works with Classic skins only)
EQINFO ............ Query Eq parameters (10 bands, Preamp, Status, Autoload)
EQSET ............ Set Eq parameters (Same format as EQINFO)
EQSTATUS ............ Toggle Eq status (ON / OFF)
EQSTATUS ON ............ Set Eq status ON
EQSTATUS OFF ............ Set Eq status OFF


Winamp Display
ONTOP ............ Toggle Always On Top option
MAINWIN ............ Toggle Main Window (Show / Hide)
MINIMIZE ............ Minimize Winamp


Misc
CDPLAY ............ Play CD


Examples


CLAMP /PLAY
CLAMP /PLCLEAR /PLADD "MySong1.mp3" /PLADD "MySong2.mp3" /PLAY


----------------

If anyone needs more help, let me know. I could give more detailed instructions if there is a need, and if I know what people are having problems with.

--Bill Allyn

[HA Dave]

GOOD JOB billallyn!

HELPFUL information.

[-Bill- (of wgjohns.com)]

billallyn,

Cool idea (and a nice write-up)! 

You get a HELPFUL from me too!

P.S.
I don't do breakfast... but she does make the coffee!     

[s0urc3f0ur]

Well I had some trouble getting Clamp to load my playlist and initiate a random start. So I used WACommand in conjunction with Clamp to get the job done. I  needed my halloween prop to say more then just one thing. So I created a batch file this way:

@ECHO OFF
clamp/start
wacommand /clear
wacommand /random=1
wacommand /load C:\Documents and Settings\HP_Owner\My Documents\My Music\My Playlists\HAlloween.m3u
wacommand /next
wacommand /play

I've tested at least 10 times and it works flawlessly now! You can find WACommand here :

http://www.flippet.org/wacommand.html

Just make sure to put it in your windows dir and test the commands from the cmd

[s0urc3f0ur]

Also Wavepad is a great freeware for editing, recording, and converting audio file formats. It has a very easy and intuitive GUI .I used it to create multiple spooky sounds for halloween.