VUmeter

Introduction

Some songs in your display may be enhanced by a digital VUmeter (Volume Unit meter) display. The VUmeter adds nice visual activity to your display and can be synced to music or speaking parts.

You can make the VUmeter as large as you like, have as many segments as you like, use different colors for different volume levels, and arrange in either a vertical or horizontal format.

You could also arrange the segments of your VUmeter in a semicircle, such that when the segments light in sequence they give a rotational effect, mimicking the needle of an old-fashioned mechanical VUmeter.

My Implementation

My VUmeter display is 6 feet tall by 16 inches wide and composed of 16 red LED segments. I just happened to have 16 199x Thunderbird car tail light segments that each have an array of 22 red LEDs that operate on 12V, that I repurposed for the VUmeter display. Here's the result:

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  Front view

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  Back view

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  VUmeter assembly mounted into a sleeve

Here is a short video clip of the VUmeter in action. The video quality is poor, but you can see the activity it can add to your display. NOTE: upload of the video clip is pending Wiki support of this file type.

A final thing I will offer is a very technical description of the VUmeter circuit implementation. It it unlikely that you will be able to directly use any of this information since my display is a very customized Arduino-based implementation. However you may be able to benefit from some of the general discussion of the approach used, in particular the audio smoothing discussion and circuit.