[Orthus]

Ok, here's the gist of what I've been doing. No SD card, just the atmel's flash memory (32K). I'm storing raw-format sound samples in that memory. The sample values are used to set a pwm pin on the Arduino. That pin is connected to a LM386 audio amp. The samples are 8Khz. There are 3 samples:

power-up: played forward for on, backward for off (hey, I have to conserve memory somehow

hum: very short sample that I had to edit looking at the waveform so that I can loop it without a "click" when it hits the end of the sample and returns to the start.

clash: a standard, medium length saber-on-saber clash

Three analog ports are used to read a 3-axis accelerometer that I use to calculate a current acceleration vector (after subtracting gravity) and use that to shift out the hum data either faster or slower, depending upon the magnitude and sign of the acceleration.

You could use either the accel or a clash sensor to trigger the clash. If you use a clash sensor, it takes up another digital port.

A second pwm pin is hooked to the BuckPuck's control line so it controls the brightness of a luxeon led.

A digital port is hooked to a reed relay to cut power to the BuckPuck to conserve batteries in standby.

Another digital port is hooked to the activation switch and has an interrupt routine associated with it.

I posted the sound code from Michael Smith's Arduino forum post on sound generation back in this post:
http://forums.thecustomsabershop.com...3&postcount=79

My code resembles it still, but now it has a state machine that keeps track of the current saber state (standby, powerup, powerdown, hum, clash)
and does a bunch of squirrely things to make the swing out of the hum.
If you used Tim's swing and clash sensors and just triggered a swing sample, you could build a reasonable board without many of the headaches I've had. That said, I've kept doing this because I'm also working on sensor networks research and this summer's work will be to build wireless nodes out of arduinos. I love my job...

[Equality 7-2521]

Orthus, I'm on a somewhat parallel journey as what you've described and finally getting down to translating the accelerometer data in to a flange/modulation/? of the idle hum cycle.

You mentioned earlier in the thread that you'd be willing to share some of your work in this aspect of the project, that offer still good?

Seeing this evolution of saber sound brought to fruition will bring me tremendous joy.