Electronics/Amplification help needed.

[Bryan]

The Mighty Mule driveway alarm is not so mighty. It squeaks like a mouse rather than kicking like a Mule. If I am running the compressor, radio or in another part of the house I cannot hear it period. The dog can hear it and he is not so nice to visitors that he does not know..Are any of you handy with PC board modification? I need a MUCH LOUDER speaker or a small external one but still have the volume control capability. I'll be glad to pay you for your trouble or trade for goods/service in the store. I'd appreciate it if you had some experience working with electronics and didn't use the Mighty Mule as your 1st experiment. Please E-mail me if you can help. [email protected]

[8dust]

Sadly, I don’t have any experience in setting something like this up, but I do have a great deal of experience with being generally unaware of what is going on around me, particularly in the shop.

I would think that the compressor, various tools, and AC/DC set to 11, will be hard to compete with for any audio alarm at least part of the time, and those will inevitably be the times the Girl Scout comes up the driveway for an air fill, and gets eaten by the dog.

Anything loud enough for the loud times, may scare the hell out of you during the quiet afternoons.

What about rigging the sensor to flash all or part of the lights in the shop a couple times, in addition to a beep or ding? Seems like I have seen setups like that before...

[gj1963]

I have done a number of AM car radios the opposite way - add a switched minijack input and use the radios amplifier and volume control to run the stock speakers on my old cars where I want the stock radio but real tunes. I think the opposite can be done in this case -- identify the output pre-volume control and solder in a RCA minijack. Then you can run that to any speaker setup you like -- something like a computer speaker system would be a very simple solution. Others may surely have more experience (I dont think I'm good enough at this to not hack something up) and other ideas.... Just a thought.

[crimediver]

I have a training collar I used to train my labrador retriever. You push a button on a transmitter and it delivers a shock through the collar. You could wear this collar when you are working and have a sign directing any visitors to push the button on the transmitter to obtain service. I am sure it would be very effective but I would put a sign on it that would say "Only ring once".

[luis]

I have a training collar I used to train my labrador retriever. You push a button on a transmitter and it delivers a shock through the collar. You could wear this collar when you are working and have a sign directing any visitors to push the button on the transmitter to obtain service. I am sure it would be very effective but I would put a sign on it that would say "Only ring once".

[knowone]

A vintage fire bell works wonders
Invigorating for the heart too
You can pad the bell some
G'day from over here.

[Creed]

Well, it looks like it's using a piezo buzzer, which if I recall actually uses an AC current to generate a tone. So, it's not as easy as simply a replacing a speaker with a line out to an amp. That being said, it's still not too hard. You could solder on a pair of wires to the piezo buzzer leads, then feed it into something like an Arduino(http://www.adafruit.com/products/50), which would in turn watch for a change in the current. At that point, you would just output some loud and annoying sound to any standard amp(a cheap guitar amp would work fine here) until the current at the piezo buzzer falls off. You can get Arduinos from Radio Shack now(what, the Shack is relevant to experimenters again?), along with the bits you need for the project, if that's the route you want to take.

You could do the same thing without a microcontroller, but I am a programmer, not an analog circuit designer