I need help with something for my son, please

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1

I am trying to make something for my son and I am having a difficult time with this as I know near nothing about it. I build models and add in little things like an LED in the engines or putting motors in the wings of airplanes. So let me explain what I want to do.

I have a turret and I want to put LEDs in the barrels of the turret. I want to be able to push a button and play sound and I want the LEDs to flash in sync with the sound. I have the sound in an editor program so I can see the exact times I need the LEDs to flash, which are not evenly timed intervals. The times would be almost random and if I build a board with capacitors and transistors, it would be a nightmare.

The sound I can drop onto audio playback module, its cheap and easy to come by. The module has an intermittent switch to start the playback.

What I would like is a programmable board that would produce the outputs that I need. Maybe something that I could program to output a signal at 500 mlsec, 700 milsec, 1200 milsec… etc. It would only run for a total of about 10 seconds or so.

I have seen ray gun toys that do something similar to this… you pull the trigger once and it makes sounds “pew pew pew” while a light sequence is running, but I don’t know what is inside of these thigs…

Any direction would be appreciated.

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Any of the Arduinos will do that. The programming would be pretty simple.

3

The smallest Arduino commonly available would be Adafruit’s Trinket.

http://www.adafruit.com/products/1501

How would you be powering this all ? What kind of, how many (and what color) LEDs were you thinking of using ? Depending on the answers you might get either the 3.3V or 5V version of the above and need (or not) some kind of LED driver circuit.

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I’d go so far as to say that if you bought an Arduino and an LED, any number of us would write the code for you since it’s quite simple.