Sound Check
At the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History's Noble Planetarium, one Raspberry Pi has replaced four CD players for various music and sound effects.
At the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History's Noble Planetarium, one Raspberry Pi has replaced four CD players for various music and sound effects.
Sound has long been essential to planetariums for creating an immersive experience. Before digital anything, planetarium shows were completely manual operations performed live by the host. Relay routing (Figure 1) was used to direct up to 10 or 12 different sound effects, music, and background sounds to speakers around the dome – an early surround-sound system.
Today, digital planetarium systems make it easy to drop soundtracks, sound effects, and just about anything else onto a timeline so that the timing and visuals are always in sync. Even with digital systems, however, live presentations are still our preferred style of planetarium show.
To control the audio during live presentations, I wrote an audio player that incorporates background and walk-in music, sound effects, and announcements. My custom audio player is controlled from the Raspberry Pi Foundation's new 7-inch touchscreen (Figure 2).
Seeing Red
The color scheme of the audio player is all shades of red, because red affects our night vision the least. Although movie and traditional stage theaters also rely on darkness to tell their stories, it is even more essential in planetariums.
All of the monitors have red filters installed to lower their light output. This also makes it possible for the operator to look back and forth between the monitor and the dome itself and still be able to see.
The audio player handes audio using three different modes. Each mode is slightly different in its required arguments and how it handles the sound. Modes are selected in a config file (Listing 1), so it's easy to change behavior or add new audio files.
Listing 1
config.txt
Planetarium Walk In /home/scott/domeAudio/walkin PLAYLIST Cattle Walk In /home/scott/domeAudio/cattle PLAYLIST General /home/scott/domeAudio/announcements/basicBeep.wav ANNOUNCEMENT High Traffic /home/scott/domeAudio/announcements/high traffic.wav ANNOUNCEMENT tech diff /home/scott/domeAudio/announcements/technical difficulties.wav BACKGROUND young ast /home/scott/domeAudio/announcements/young astronomers.wav ANNOUNCEMENT
The config file shown in Listing 1 shows a list of audio sources with tab-separated arguments. The first field is the caption for the interface, the second is the path to the file/folder, and the third is which mode to use for this source.
When a presenter is ready to start a show, they make their audio selections on the touchscreen. The choices include the pre-show/walk-in music and any background sounds they might want to include. I like to use crickets and birds for a nice spring day; other presenters will use the telltale beep of Sputnik passing overhead.
Before the Raspberry Pi was in place, the old CD players had a tendency to skip or shut off randomly (Figure 3). Each source on the mixer also had to be individually adjusted and unmuted. When trying to coordinate a live program, any step that can be eliminated is extremely helpful. (See the "Video Playback" box for more details.)
Video Playback
During the same upgrade to replace the CD players, I also replaced two DVD players for looping video. The monitors already had HDMI capability, so I just added the Raspberry Pi behind the monitor and left the old cabling in place.
I started with a video file of the DVD contents and played it with omxplayer like this:
omxplayer -b --loop video.mpg
I added that line to /etc/rc.local
so the player starts automatically on boot.
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