Water Pump Designed Audio Spectrum Analyzer

The project utilizes water pumps to create a spectrum analyzer that will be interfaced with real-time audio.

The project features real-time response and tunable to frequency ranges to increase bin resolution. The input comes from a microphone, wave-input, and MP3 while the outputs are the water jets that represent spectral frequencies. An audio from any audio device is being captured by the Matlab GUI from a computer which calculates sound FFT and uses LPT port to send further data to FPGA board. the data from the parallel port is received by the Altera board and through Darlington resistor array, the 16 fountain pumps are controlled according to FFT amplitudes.

In order to have a visually variable amplitude with varying speed of pump that varies with flow rate which determines the height of water jet, the DC motors speed are varied with input voltage and pulse width modulation is used for digital output. A chopper circuit is used to turn the pumps ON/OFF for variable and high current amplification. It consists of a diode to assist the motor on storing and discharging current and Darlington transistor made from cascaded BJTs for current amplification.