My wife gave me a Christmas card that she found in her scrapbook stuff. It had a sound card and thin speaker in it. I was thinking of using it to create a sound car for my christmas train. the song is “Holly Jolly Christmas” by Burl Ives. was wanting some ideas on how to activate it other than on off switch. to operate it the two metal pieces come in contact when the card was opened. this is lower right with the blue piece of paper separating it for now. when closed the card would slide a piece of plastic to break contacts. It was recommended using reed switch. I have never used these before so if someone could explain how to do it or some ideas would be great… Thanks Travis
Bend the springy part open and attach a wire to each pad with low temp solder. The reed opens and closes with a magnet.
Build a small enclosure for the speaker to add bass and volume.
those 3 button batteries are it’s power, check the traces to see if they are in series or parallel for a better power supply…
John
Travis,
Radio Shack used to sell a similar “kit” which could be recorded and then played back - it looked just like yours. (Still do, apparently.) I gave it my “EBT Whistle” and fitted it in the roof of the cab on one loco.
I triggered mine from a momentary switch on the Aristo Train Engineer accessory panel. You may recall that the TE Transmitter had buttons A-E, and two of them were momentary - they triggered an action only for as long as you held them down.
Here’s a reed relay from Radio Shack. The two end pins/wires are the relay coil, and when you turn on a 12V through the coil, it closes the switch, so the other two pins (at the top end) are connected. For your application, if you fed it with track power, it will turn on the music when running and off (saving the batteries) when not.
As mentioned above, you can also activate a reed relay with a magnet instead of a coil, in which case they look something like this:
Pass a magnet near it and the contacts come together. For your train, you could put the reed switch near the outside of a car and put a magnet on top of it (disguised as a lamp, box, or whatever) when you want the music to start. Take it off to quieten the device.
Glass relays are very fragile, I use the ones like Phoenix sound has and there are flat ones available from digi-key. These are very robust and do not break easily, plus no problem when soldering as they have real wires.
round http://www.digikey.com/product-search/en?keywords=59025-010
Flat http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/59150-030/59150-030-ND/154472
Notice the mounting holes in the flat version and I use computer standoffs for mounting.
I have used the reed switches for alarm systems in the past. They are encapsulated in plastic, so they won’t get damaged.