Digital recorder/player connections

In this video, we're going to show you how to wire our sound module to our Bitsy bot and how to attach it. The first thing we're going to do is disconnect our speaker. We need the speaker wires to be longer and we want to feed them through the small hole from the top so that we can put the speaker on the bottom. So we've fed the wires through. They're about six inches long. And we're just soldering them now to the speaker. So these are the new wires. And they're 22 gauge solid core copper wires. We're taping them down so that we get a good solder joint and so the wire doesn't move around. And we're just getting that solder to flow over the wire there. So now we're going to take and we're going to put down a hot glue blob about the size of a dime. And we'll use that hot glue blob to hold the speaker in place. And the speaker's magnet back causes the metal back causes the hot glue to dry fast. And then we're just going to tape down our speaker wires so they don't move around on the back side of the craft there. And now we're working on our record button. And there's two metal pads that we can solder wires to. And they're nice, big, fat pads, so it's easy to solder to. And that'll allow us to move the record switch to the Arduino. So now we're stripping the wires here. These are the power wires. I'm sorry, these are the wires for the speaker. So we're going to use our shrink wrap tubing and we're feeding these over the wires that are coming from the speaker. And we soldered those wires just a little bit so it'll make it easier to connect. And we're feeding the shrink wrap tubing down over that so that once we make the connection we can insulate it. So now we're just a holding the two wires together with our alligator clip and we're soldering them with our soldering iron. And once again, these are the speaker wires. So we're going to connect the other side the same way, just using the soldering iron. And once we have the two wires connected, we'll slide the shrink wrap tubing up over the solder joint and that will help to protect the wires and prevent them from shorting against one another. And so once we have both the shrink wrap pieces up, we'll use our shrink wrap gun to shrink the shrink wrap and seal the wires, protect them. So now we're going to remove the power wire connector and strip the power wires. And we are going to connect the stranded, it's about a 32 gauge wire, to our 22 gauge solid core copper wire, which is hookup wire. And we're doing that because it's easier to connect to our five volt power distribution board that we installed in an earlier video. You can see that board underneath our sound module there. So we're just twisting the wire around our solid core copper and we're running our solderer around it. We're sliding the heat shrink tubing over the new joints in the wires to prevent them from shorting against one another. Now we're just going to heat shrink those wires up using our heat shrink gun. And again, that'll provide us a insulated connection. All right, so we're going to pop off the Play button here-- this is the Play button-- so that we can get to the traces below the Play button. We're going to scrape off some of the lacquer leading into the button connection. And the reason for that is that the button connection wires are too small to solder to. But the traces are big enough that we can solder to those. So we're going to use our 22 gauge copper wire and we're going to just solder to both sides of the switch trace. And so that's the first side. And then we'll also solder to the second side. So it's really important that the wires are not moved around, because the joints that we're creating with the solder are very small and so there's not a lot holding the wires in place. So we'll go back and put some hot glue over those wires to make sure they stay in place. But first we're going to test everything to make sure that it works. So we'll hold our two record wires together to see if we can get to record and make a sound by snapping our fingers. [SNAPPING] And now we're going to press the Play button and cross our fingers and hope that it works. [SNAPPING] Yeah, it did. So that's great. So now we're going to put the hot glue over those two wires and that will help to maintain the wire's position and keep them from moving around and breaking free and destroying the joint there. It's about a dime sized blob of hot glue, about 1/8 of an inch thick. And we want to make sure we let it dry before we connect anything else. OK, so now we've place the sound card next to our five volt power distribution strip. And we're drilling a hole so that we can allow our record button to stick through the lexan, and that'll allow us to manually trigger the record button so that we can do testing if for some reason it's not being triggered by the Arduino. So we're just drilling this hole out with a quarter inch drill bit. And we're going to clean up the rough edges with our break off blade knife. So now we're putting down our about a quarter size blob of hot glue, about 1/8 of an inch thick. And that will give us a place to connect our sound module to. We want to make sure we let that blob of hot glue cool for about 30 seconds before we connect it. And that will help to keep the glue from squishing out everywhere when we push our sound card down. Now we're going to take the hot glue and again put about a dime sized piece down so that we can push our record button through and hold it in place. It's important that that hot glue does not touch the actual button itself, otherwise it may not function properly. So time for a final test. [SNAPPING] Connecting our play wires. [SNAPPING] Great. It looks like it's going to work. So we're going to go ahead and connect our Arduino now to the layout. And we'll put that over the machine screws and then once we get the Arduino in the right location, we'll push it down. And we're just tightening the nut there with our needle nose pliers. OK, so now we're connecting our ground wire to the five volt distribution board that we made from our breadboard the other day. And we're going to connect the five volt positive wire to the positive five volts on the five volt distribution board as well. And that's going to give us power to our sound card. And in the upcoming videos, we'll show you how to wire the sound card to the Arduino to make it play.