Monday Night Project (MNP) is my attempt to have a regular rhythm to work on a project from start to finish. Each Monday night, between 8ish and 10ish I will work a bit on the project, and post a write-up about my progress to keep some public pressure up to actually follow through 
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On to my first MNP!
Our local watering hole has a deck overlooking a pond and parts of the community. In winter people usually just go out for a quick smoke, but in summer its rather pleasant to stay out there and banter away, increasing in volume as the night wears on and alcohol gets into heads. Obviously there are complaints 
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One night, after a few beers too many, the idea came up of having an electronic minder, that shushes people when it gets too loud. As with every beer idea, you're surprised to find that there's actually already a product or two or three that one could buy. But where's the fun in that?
So here we go: The "Think of your neighbors", or Toyn, as I like acronyms.
A microphone picks up sound which is converted to a digital value by an ADC. Some magic determines what's acceptable, tolerable, or too loud. The magic device then drives a sign with RGB blinkenlights to indicate when it's time to tone it down.
For A/D conversion and magic I will use a MSP430G2553 on a rev 1.5 LaunchPad. 6 analog outputs should be perfect to drive the LEDs. Programmed with Energia to keep things simple.
For the microphone, I ordered a breakout board from SparkFun that also includes an amplifier. While I was at it, I also included 6 N-channel MOSFETs to drive the sign, which I expect to be constructed from 1 or 2 non-addressable RGB strips. The parts from SparkFun arrived today, as usual including a convenient red project box.
I haven't ordered the LEDs yet (probably some cheap LED strips from eBay). For prototyping, a few random RGB LEDs from the chunk bin will do… well turns out I don't have any RGB LED in my chunk bin. So I will resort to regular green, yellow and red LEDs to indicate sound levels for now.
Tonight, most of the allotted time was spent with this initial write-up, collecting the parts and installing Energia 15. And tracking down the notorious "No FET found" error to a dodgy USB cable.
Next week is breadboard time. Probably I will start on the microphone side.