Tones and Speakers:

• Chords, although bad sounding, are much louder and vibrate more then single tones.
• 1 Watt may not actually be enough power for what we are trying to do.  Both the mini-speaker and the hacked cone-less speaker have the same volume.  The hacked speaker provides more vibration but too much pressure on the voice coil stalls it.
• A speaker with high sensitivity like the ones in my sony headphones might be good.  They can produce over 100db with 30mw of input.  The low power makes me think these will still stall, not vibrate enough, and if you remove the cone they will be quiet.
• I did not see these when I was looking for transducers before but these may be perfect: http://www.parts-express.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?Partnumber=300-379.
• Not sure how we would power them or what amplifiers we would need but these may be good for providing a thump on initial contact: http://www.parts-express.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?Partnumber=300-388

Comm:

• BYTE as defined by windows.h is an unsigned char.  It is also defined in the standard arduino library.
• Sending commands for each step of volume is slow.  Its better to send the change in steps and let the arduino handle it.
• Notes from conversation with Phil:

COMMAND
INIT
SETVOUME
PLAYSOUND
MUTESOUND

RESPONSE
ECHO SERIAL STATUS
EXECUTING
DONE

COMMAND ARRAY:  COMMAND, SERIAL, DATA (3 Bytes)

• Cleaning up arduino sketch an rewriting the parts from the examples.