The lighting effects are coming along quite nicely, but I felt that we didn’t have enough “noise makers” for the daytime kids. So I came up with the Really Annoying Sound Effects button idea.

It’s pretty simple: A three foot long box with eight buttons mounted on it.

Those are “arcade” buttons, so they are meant to take a beating. They are also nice and big — 1 1/4″ across.

Here is some of the wiring on the reverse side:

The wires run down to one end of the board, where they will be soldered to a DB-9 connector (the same use in Atari and Commodore games/computers).

The buttons are going to be included in this “black box”:

I’m not sure yet whether I’m going to mount the button assembly horizontally or vertically. We’ll see.

Once the button controller is done, it will get hooked up to an Arduino with a Wave Shield. The Wave portion allows the Arduino board to (easily) play audio files. The idea is to load up some creepy sound effects on the Shield. Then when kids hit the buttons, it plays the different sounds. If we have time, we might also have it control other stuff (like moving effects — bats spinning, arms moving, etc).

Again, the idea is that this is one of the “young kid friendly” effects.

Update: Here is the base I came up with. I ended up going with the vertical setup. The base is heavy enough to keep it from falling over.