Rubber Chicken Launcher Game

Hello, My name is Wayne and I want to build a carnival game. The object of the game is to shoot a rubber chicken with compressed air at a target. The program would follow the following steps.
1. Operator will depress the “arming switch” switch #1 to an input pin to start the launch sequence program. I have a push button and a SD MP3 module for the pre-launch music. Relay #1 will turn on lights.
2. The player will press switch #2 that will act as a trigger to a second imput pin. This subprogram will trigger sound effects and #2 solenoid to open an air valve for 1 second to shoot the rubber chicken. I need a delay to prevent additional switch depressions from re-releasing the air valve (to conserve air pressure capacity).

The arming switch is for safety. The operator must be out of the way before the trigger can launch the rubber chicken.

I have been reading the PIXAXE books and watched many videos. I purchased a starter kit from Ebay with a 20M2 with a breadboard and download cable. I have done the practice projects provided. The SD reader is a MDFly mp3 player and I have a two solenoid board. All run on 5volts. I hope to run the board with a USB 2A wal-wart.
I hope you can help. This is my first project. I have the parts but don't know how to connect the SD mp3 (two sound files) or the solenoids.
Wayne
Morganton North Carolina USA

first post wayne so welcome to one of the best forums around,

for my projects when i need to wait for a button press to be released i just use a "do-loop" structure:

do
pause 1
loop until pinc.XX =0
pause 100

it works fine for me and will not proceed onwards until i have released the button.

as for the solenoids you will be able to use a transistor/mosfet to switch those on but you need to find out how much current/voltage they will need to switch on and select a suitable component accordingly to match their requirements, the interfacing circuits manual number 3 will give you information about how to interface those components together.

a lot of users in the forum have used various mdfly mp3 players in lots of different projects so that should give a good few hits for you to read over if you use the forum search tool.

once you are ready to start getting the working circuit together if you are not completely sure of things then just post up a circuit schematic of what you have and you will no doubt get plenty of advice, guidance and recommendations of anything that you should change or optimise to get the best performance and not to let the factory installed smoke out lol.



tony

Thanks Tony. A friendly point in the right direction is what I needed.
Wayne

I need to get far enough along to be able to ask specific questions.

Don't forget to put reverse diodes across your inductive components [driven by MOSFETs or BJTs?] or you'll likely fry something... and of course bypass capacitors near the 20M2 power pins... and you and your participants wear safety glasses... [I'm a one eyed proponent of safety glasses... learning by experience is not worth it with eye safety...].

Thanks for the heads up. I'll post again when I get further.

With an M2, you can arrange delays of a few seconds using the elapsed time counter
http://www.picaxe.com/BASIC-Commands/Advanced-PICAXE-Configuration/enabletime/