Soundboard

So I realize there's no way I'm going to design an I/O board.  Don't have the time, don't have the patience, and I figure if it's too hard for me, it's probably hard for many others.  It's my intent to make the simplest pinball possible so that others might also build one when they thought they couldn't.

Initially I thought using an IPAC board connected to a PC with soundboard software might be the easiest, but this is also the most wasteful.  I mean your having to run a PC which will end up using at least 100W of power, plus boot time, plus cost of Operating system (if you want to be legit).  So then I thought what about those little recorders.  They have them in greeting cards, keychains, etc.  For each target that makes a noise, I could have one of these boards hooked up, and then have one of those rocker momentary switches activate it

Of course, most of these boards make you record with a crappy mic, and if you ever decided to replace all the sounds (new theme, updated sounds of current theme), you'd have to dig the boards out, re-record, install them back in.  Then I found this:


For $5 on ebay, you get a board with a removable memory chip (which sticks into a USB dongle), and depending on sample rate you can record up to 52 seconds (wave or mp3).  I figure this is probably the simplest and easiest way to add sound to a pinball without complicated logic.  I would probably nix the weak speaker and run every board into one main amp/speaker system so it sounded good.