My fingers were itchy. I wanted to find out how good the sound trigger really is. My first attempt with the flash gun did not work too well. The flash fires off only with a really loud hand clap or an air blow onto the electret microphone. I had to replace the PN2222A transistor I used with the OptoIsolator I used with the laser trigger circuit--it looks like, although I am not sure why, the Base of the PN2222A may need to be driven by at least 3.8 volts or higher current but the circuit could muster only 2.5 volts or so and about 3 mA, but about 2.5 volts is enough to activate the OptoIsolator. With the OptoIsolator, a finger snap can trigger the flash gun to fire. After I got the flash to fire, it was time to look for some target to shoot.
I remember seeing a couple of bags of balloons at my place a few years ago but cannot find them anymore. Perhaps they were used up for weddings and birthday parties. Balloons would be really cool I think, but there was none around. I had nothing cool to test the sound trigger with. I decided to test with a marble and a column of Mega Blok blocks. I am unimpressed with the capture but it shows how good the sound trigger worked.
The marble hits the column of Mega Bloks pretty hard--I used to play with marbles and a flicker of the thumb sends the marble off pretty fast and hard. One can see in the photo below where the column broke and how the top half stayed fixed while the bottom half started to move by a millimeter or so. So, the sound trigger worked quite well.
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| Marble and Mega Bloks |
I think the Dollar Store sells those balloons. If I have time tomorrow, I will grab a few balloons to try out.
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