Sound Supervisor

Project Description

Do you use windows? Are you familiar with the volume mixer? If not, that’s partially how windows handles the volume levels of the different applications running on top of the OS. I wanted a way to control this volume mixer in the real world, to have it occupy space on my desk rather than have to tab out of a game or break up my development environment to change the volume of my music or podcast. Here’s a demo:

In the desktop application, the user assigns a process name to one of the knobs, and that’s it! The application’s volume is mapped to the location of the potentiometer.

The schematic is so simple it isn’t even worth making. Essentially, vcc and ground are connected in parallel across the outer terminals of each pot, and the wiper is wired directly into an analog input on the arduino.

Sound Supervisor

The source code for the arduino is here and the C# application can be found here, but you’ll have to install and configure nircmd first to run it. The .stl file for the case can be found here as well.

Remember, this was made in less than 24 hours, so there isn’t a lot of polish.