Arduino – SOMO interfacing:

• Hooked up the SOMO with a 220uf capacitor on the power supply going to ground and put one 2.2k resistor between the arduino pin and the SOMO pin for each of the serial wires.
• First memory card(PNY) was not compatible.  Needed to get a sandisk 2gb uSD.
• At first i had the speaker hooked up directly to the SOMO.  This produced good sound but had far less range with only 7 steps.  Once I knew this was working I put the output wire through our amplifier.
• The piezoelectric speaker that i had from my computer motherboard is really only designed for tones so it might be blown.
• Eventually I am going to have the i2c resistor controlled through the arduino instead of the FTDI chip we are using.  I am not sure how often this will happen but there was a conflict with the com ports.
• Spent a good amount of time trying to find the best speaker for the job.  Eventually I found these: http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Detail&name=668-1206-1-ND
• 13mmx13mmx4mm is a good size for fingertips and we probably embed them into the surface of the next prototype(if that is not insanely hard to do).  They get up to 85db which is about the same as someone singing loudly so that should be good.  Not sure how much it resonates, but we can probably increase that through mounting techniques.
• Tomorrow, I will start working on the rcs system code to prepare it to work with our original prototype so we can test this method.  A lot of its already written, just have to add the SOMO commands and fix the parts that I couldn’t test before.  We can probably use our big cone speaker while we wait for the fingertip sized ones.