audio trigger

[davisgraveyard]

I have a project that uses a Prop1 that when triggered plays a footstep sound and sequentially lights up some UV lighted footsteps and then activates a 12VDC solenoid.    The Prop1 is triggered by a sound activated circuit the is fed the audio from a video signal.  The video has no audio except at the moment I want the trigger to happen. 

http://www.simplecircuitboards.com/Spec%20Sheets/Sound%20Activated%20Relay.pdf

This circuit works but has proven to be unreliable.  I am looking for something that will ALWAYS trigger the Prop1 at a certain point in the video.   

One idea I had was if I could embed CC into the video signal I wonder if I could detect that and then start the Prop1 instead of relying on a trigger?

There is an Arduino shield called the Video experimenter that detects CC signals and sends them serially.   

http://nootropicdesign.com/ve/

But I'm not sure how I could get it to work with the Prop1?   Is there a simpler solution I am not seeing?  Is there a more robust audio signal switch out there?

Jeff

[JonnyMac]

Scary Terry, who actually uses what he designs, posted this on his site:

-- http://www.scary-terry.com/audiodriver/audiodriver.pdf

Like the product you tried, this is designed to trigger on a specific audio level.

He also used an LM567 to create a tone-detector trigger:

-- http://www.scary-terry.com/more_stuff/tonedet/tonedet.htm

With this is uses Audacity to place trigger tones onto a separate audio track.  The advantage of triggering with tone (frequency) versus level is that you can have multiple devices on the line and trigger them independently.