¡HONK!

Kate Reed

Lets face it, car horns are annoying, and misleading. You can never really get your anger out on an average car horn. I am making an alternative non-annoying car horn. This horn will make different sounds than the average honks. 

The ultimate goal is to have two speakers on top of the car, one facing forward and one facing behind. There are sneaky wires running from the speakers to inside the car. Inside the car the wires will run through a steering wheel cover, and be distributed to different buttons on the steering wheel cover. The concept is that when you press a button on the steering wheel cover, a different honk sound comes out. 

There are five buttons, two green, two yellow and one red. When you press the corresponding button, the car horn says; “Watch out!”, “Nice bumper sticker”, “Put the phone down!”, “Nice blinker” and “Really?”. The car horn says every thing you cannot thoroughly express through a normal car horn. 

The car horn is made of a wave shield, which improves audio quality. Other components are two speakers, two breadboards which connect wires without soldering them, and an amplifier. The arduino wave shield had to be put together, which was a tedious task. The wave shield had about 20 different parts that each had at least two wires that needed to be soldered. I had to follow diagrams to find out how to put the wave shield together.  I did a pretty good job soldering except for the pins. I soldered all 26 pins on the wave shield upside down. 


After the soldering I had to connect the speakers to the amplifier, the amplifier to the wave shield, the wave shield to the arduino and the arduino to the breadboard.  I had to solder wires to the analog output numbers on the shield. I plugged those wires to the breadboard and connected the buttons. 

I then had to sew the perf board onto the steering wheel cover. A perf board is a breadboard that you can solder onto and also cut to shape. I put buttons on the perf board and the wires to connect them to the other breadboard. It was hard to sew the pref board on because the steering wheel cover is made of thick rubber, which was very difficult to sew to. 

If I had more time and a car I would actually install the car horn onto a car, and test it out.