After inheriting a hundred or so 1/4" reel to reel tapes from my great uncle who recorded live Dixieland bands and many other venues, I was tasked with transcoding the analog tapes into digital recordings to share with family. With my audio interface I connected the RCA outputs of the reel-to-reel tape deck to the interfaces inputs then I recorded the tape through Adobe Audition. The issue with completing the task manually was I would have to reverse the tape myself once one side is complete (the auto-reverse feature was broken) and turn it off manually; this took some great timing and sometimes I would forget and the recording on the computer would go on an extra hour. With the smaller tapes having a runtime of 3 hours I had to come up with a better way.
I create an extremely simple robot using the LEGO NXT system and then connected it to my computer which ran scripting software to begin and end the recording. The process that the system went through was initializing the tape recorder, beginning the recording on the computer, reversing the tape once it is at is end, and the stopping & saving the recording, and finally turning off the tape deck. Now I can begin a recording, leave the house, and trust that the tape is recorded. All I must do it load the tape into the machine and press the key on my keyboard to begin the process. I used the AutoHotKey scripting language to controller the computer software. I programmed the system and envisioned it myself.
Here is a video demonstrating the device working.
