# Toy House with Sound Effects


About a month ago, my youngest daughter borrowed a really neat toy called ["Talkative Chick's House Ppiyak-e House Bird Toy Mimiworld"](http://koreantoyshop.com/talkative-chicks-house-ppiyak-e-house-bird-toy-mimiworld/), who'd brought the toy back with her on a trip from Korea.

![Talkative Chick's House Ppiyak-e House Bird Toy Mimiworld "Talkative Chick's House Ppiyak-e House Bird Toy Mimiworld"](images/Mimiworld2.jpg "Talkative Chick's House Ppiyak-e House Bird Toy Mimiworld")

The toy consists of a little bird, and a little bird house. The bird house has four activities for the chick. When the chick is placed over one of the play areas, a sound effect is played - the coolest of which was a washroom. You can kind of get the idea from the [Mimi World Talkative Chick House Toy review on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_We-P6mUvk) (skip to 7 minute mark).

In any case, this was inspiration for a project I thought would be fun for she and I to work on together. Although I knew this wouldn't be slick, I thought the quickest and easiest way to do this would be:

1. Use a hall effect (magnet) sensor as a contactless sensor
2. Install a magnet in a stuffed toy (not suitable for small children!)
3. Take readings from the sensor with an Arduino
4. Interpret the readings and play a selection of sound effects on a PC

We took a shoebox, and she built a home for a small stuffed toy, a "Teany Ty" she named Jelly. I cut open the the stuffed toy, and installed a couple of magnets, and sewed it back up. I picked up some [hall effect (magnet) sensors from Creatron](https://www.creatroninc.com/product/a1301-hall-effect-sensor-linear/), and wired it up to an Arduino nano, and installed the sensors in key areas of the home.

![Toy House - Outside View](images/IMG_0039-e1536457916357.jpg "Toy House - Outside View")

![Toy House - Inside View](images/IMG_0041-e1536457876343.jpg "Toy House - Inside View")

I wrote a few lines of Python to read the data from the Arduino, and play back the samples. I'd never used Python before, and had heard about the PyGame libraries for years - I thought it would be rock solid, but even within a minute of play, with my setup, [I had issues with MP3 sound effects that others had encountered as well](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/pygame-mirror-on-google-groups/2NMwDlKrUZw). I converted them to WAV files and that went away.

We had fun picking and recording samples, eating and slurping water into the microphone. [Freesound](https://freesound.org/) was a great place to look for sounds, though it didn't quite have the breadth that my daughter was looking for ("I want a recording of a tiger walking on dry leaves").

The sensor/magnet combination I chose wasn't quite sensitive enough - the tiny magnet in the stuffed toy had to be really close to the sensor to trigger the sound.  It does work, and it was a fun build.

[Play ProjectBirdDemo.m4v](images/ProjectBirdDemo.m4v)

Source Code: [ProjectBird.zip](/projects/ProjectBird.zip)