Your Theme Song Greets You At The Front Door

One thing you can look forward to when arriving at home after a long, arduous day at the office is some peppy theme music when you walk in the door. [Sebastian Sommer] built the system, and shows it off in the video after the break by dancing to James Brown’s I feel good.

The setup uses an Arduino as a microcontroller. It monitors a hall effect sensor on the jamb which detects a passing magnet on the door. We guess this means the system doesn’t know if you’re coming or going but perhaps a future upgrade would add an infrared beam to detect your legs as head out the door. The music itself is played by an SparkFun MP3 shield which has a decoder chip, microSD slot, and audio jack for the powered speakers. [Sebastian] grabbed a copy of [Bill Porter’s] mp3 shield library to get the project up and running quickly.

This is a pretty cool addition if you’re already using an Arduino for a door lock or vice versa. Or maybe you’re not home enough to make this hack worth it, in which case you simply must take this music playing Tesla coil hat along on your commute.

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/37957487 w=470]

16 thoughts on “Your Theme Song Greets You At The Front Door

  1. I’m not being sarcastic all here…all of man’s achievements and suffering over the ages in order make this happen…it was all worth it for this one thing to exist.

    1. Yea, but sooner or later someone will figure out how to load up the intro for the Gomer Pyle show; surprise, surprise, surprise. Not that there is anything wrong with Gomer mind you.

    1. Yeah. I was thinking the same. Yet it is easy to set up, versatile, and fun.

      Well just think all this shield stuff is almost obsolete thanks to delicious raspberry pi. No shield needed, cheaper, oh and Linux is soo gonna be this guy’s thing with his hipster clothes.

  2. I am always welcomed with good sound from our public radio station on the whole house system. Police say to leave audible activity in your home when away. It’s better than lights, works 24-7.
    As for the song, it was tainted when a laxative product used it in an long running advert.

  3. I have a couple of peeves with this design. The idea is cool but there are a bunch of flaws.

    Ignoring the fact that an expensive arduino is used for this, there is a glaring strangeness in the code, he is using the random function to generate the random track, instead of looping a variable while the device is inactive, and triggering the current number track when the door is opened. That is as random as it gets.

    Also, using a hall effect sensor where a simple reed switch would work is just wasteful.

  4. What would be better would be to set up a pressure switch under the welcome mat and have the mp3 plower play a large dog barking and a solenoid release a 1kilo sand bag to hit the door.

    that will scare away the mormons ;-)

  5. could have gone the simple rout with this and gone with 2 reed switches a magnet and a cheep mp3 player.
    first reed switch to torn the mp3 player on
    second reed switch to emulate the press of the play button how ever closing the door would reverse the effects stopping the music and turning it off.

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