Dropping This Mic Drops Your Video Call
With an accelerometer and microcontroller, Toby from Engineering Dads has made a microphone that hangs up the video call when you drop it.
The art of the mic drop
After wrapping up an impassioned speech on stage, celebrities, politicians, and many others have celebrate the end by ceremoniously dropping their microphones to the ground with an outstretched arm. As one of the YouTubers on the channel Engineering Dads, Toby, puts it, the act is a point of pride for speakers who are talking to a large audience, yet nearly all of us won't be able to experience it ourselves. To simulate dropping the mic, Toby put together a sensor, a microcontroller, and a microphone shell that could trigger the end of a video conference meeting, thus letting everyone on the other side view that moment in all its glory.
Detecting free-fall
To detect when the microphone is being dropped, the ATmega32U4 chip (the same one as in the Arduino Leonardo) needs a way to tell when its acceleration is the same as the speed of gravity, aka free-fall. By getting a 3-axis accelerometer and continuously reading from the Z-axis, the 32u4 could determine when it has been dropped. When the event occurs, the microcontroller, acting as a USB HID keyboard, sends a key combination to the host PC which leaves the current virtual meeting. A two-throw switch was also connected in order to prevent accidentally triggering this macro.
Building a microphone body
The microphone body itself was created by first taking apart an existing karaoke microphone and removing its internal battery/speaker to free up space. Next, Toby added his custom circuitry along with some added internal padding to protect everything whilst being dropped many times over. Finally, he created a small hole for the switch at the bottom of the mic before gluing the components all back into place.
Some other features
Beyond simply ending the meeting, dropping this mic will also play whatever song is next in the user's Spotify playlist to signal a jubilant end to the work week. For more information about how Toby built this highly "drop-able" microphone, you can watch his build log video here on YouTube.