light
When I was a teen, I joined an electronics club and built a disco board. I had 5 light bulbs, I painted them different colors. Then I built a board which was connected to these light bulbs. I'd connect my stereo to the board and the each light bulb would flash when a specific instrument would play (e.g. green for drums, etc…).
I want to build something similar with my son now, but I totally and utterly forgot how to do this. Can someone point me in the right direction?
There are several companies who provide turn-key solutions for this kind of application when it's wireless and internet connected. Some, from hardware to web APIs.
They may be a good place to start.
In the drawn position the lamp will be on. Switching any switch will turn it off, and again any switch will turn it on again.
If you need more than two switching points you have to add "cross-switches", like this:
You have two A-type switches (for A and B) and the others are C-type.
edit
Any manufacturer of residential switching material has those cross-type switches, but in case you would ever need them in a DIY circuit with rocker switches, you can emulate them with DPDT switches. I'll leave it as an exercise for the interested reader to find out how to wire them. :-)
Best Answer
You could look at triggering different lights with amplitude, like a VU meter. This is a cheap 5 LED digital VU meter ->
http://www.littlediode.com/components/LB1403N_LB1403_Integrated_Circuit_.html?NO_COOKIE_WARNING=2&ti=646e9cc97c539a96ef3257fa2cc49a19&xid=5c2ec922e32bf8c66047b98f481d025f
I've used it before to drive some LEDs on a kinda birthday card thing, I plugged the card into my Ipod output, and the 5 LED flowers on the card flashed with the music!
You could hook the output pins to some transistors which could then drive your colored light bulbs, it would be much cheaper and easier than using a micro controller. This would give you a regular audio level meter much like the one on a mixing desk, you could however change the order and color of the lights to mix it up a bit, so it's more of a light show. The lights also fade in with the increase of amplitude rather than just flashing on at a set value, so it would look cool.
Otherwise you would have to take a look at frequency analysis, whereby the lights could be triggered by the audio level at different frequency bands (one per light). This system would closest resemble a disco light that flashes with the different instruments in an audio track, but it's much harder to implement when compared to amplitude analysis. I'm sure a modern MCU would do the job with ease tho, with only 5 lights the resolution on the analogue inputs would not be a huge issue. If you could find some code to steal this option wouldn't be that hairy, if you're familiar with micro controllers.