Okay, so lemme tell you about this little project I tackled – “money holding mp3”. Sounds kinda weird, right? Well, here’s the deal.
It all started when my grandma kept losing her cash. Seriously, she’d stash it in the weirdest places, and then forget all about it. Under the mattress, inside a cookie jar… you name it. So, I was brainstorming, trying to come up with a way to help her keep track of her money, without being too intrusive. That’s when the idea hit me: a talking piggy bank!
First thing I did was grab an old MP3 player. You know, one of those ancient things gathering dust in a drawer. Ripped it open, careful not to totally wreck it. I needed the guts – the circuit board, the speaker, the power supply… the whole shebang.
Then I went online and ordered a cheap weight sensor. Something small and not too sensitive. Also, a little microcontroller – an Arduino Nano, to be exact. These things are tiny computers, perfect for this kind of project.
The tricky part was getting everything to fit inside a piggy bank. Found a decent sized ceramic one at a thrift store. After smashing it open without any mercy(don’t tell anyone), I had to hollow it out a bit to make room for the electronics. Dremel tool to the rescue!
Next, I wired up the weight sensor to the Arduino. This involved a lot of soldering, which I’m not the best at, but hey, gotta do what you gotta do. The idea was that when the sensor detected weight being added (i.e., coins or bills being dropped in), it would trigger the MP3 player.
Now for the fun part: the audio. I recorded a bunch of voice prompts on my phone. Things like, “Cha-ching! Another dollar in the bank!”, or “Wow, you’re saving up nicely!”. And of course, some customized messages from me and other family members like “Don’t forget you promised me a present!” I converted them to MP3 format and loaded them onto an SD card, which I then plugged into the MP3 player.
I wrote some simple code for the Arduino to read the weight sensor and trigger the MP3 player to play a random audio file from the SD card. Tested it a bunch of times to make sure it was working correctly. There was some tweaking involved, of course. The weight sensor was a little too sensitive at first, so I had to adjust the code to ignore small changes in weight, otherwise it would go off every time someone bumped the piggy bank.
Finally, I glued everything inside the piggy bank. Made sure the speaker was facing outwards so you could actually hear the audio. I then painstakingly glued the broken piggy bank back together and painted over it so it would look good as new. And added a power switch on the bottom so my grandma could turn it on and off.
Gave it to my grandma, and she loved it! At first, she was a little confused, but once she started dropping coins in and hearing the talking piggy bank, she was cracking up. It’s been a few weeks now, and she’s actually been saving more money than usual. Plus, she hasn’t lost any of it! Win-win, right?
So yeah, that’s the story of the “money holding mp3”. It was a fun little project, and it actually solved a real problem. Plus, it was a good excuse to dust off my soldering iron and play around with some electronics.
