Input/Output Project
Success is at tone (8, frequency, 10), just for the below video:
My IO project is pretty straightforward, but I’m hoping it’s setting me up for final project success as I move into MIDIs. My goal is to make some kind of musical device where I can control tones using potentiometers to make harmonies. Initially, I thought I would just control volume, but I became interested in mapping notes to different potentiometers to get more control over the sound, rather than just turning single notes on and off. I was also inspired by my latest interest, audio equipment, and I was attracted to the idea of making a container for my device that had exposed speakers and resembled hi fi speakers or old radios.
One of those reference images is of matchboxes, but I liked the look of it and thought it would make a cool cover to laser cut out a lot of holes from a thin sheet of MDF. I also put together some sketches as I thought about the construction of the thing and accounting for how many buttons I might have. I think these sketches and references will carry over to the final project as well.
The circuit board was straightforward to put together. I ordered or borrowed all the parts I needed and put together a simple analog input and output board with a potentiometer as input and a speaker as output.
I made the same board 3 times, because the Arduinos can’t play multiple tones at once (for now…) and they would also need to be powered simultaneously by different sources. I also labelled each one so I could remember what tone/frequency they were set to. I think in the next iteration I will clean up the wires and perhaps use smaller breadboards, since the set up doesn’t require much real estate. Now, onto programming.
The first thing I did was check my input range on each potentiometer to get the right values to map the sound to. Two of them were 300-1000, and one was 500-1000. Then, I mapped the tone pitch and frequency to that turn range of the potentiometers. Once I confirmed the tone worked for one board, I copied over the code to the other boards, and changed up the pitch/frequency so that each board had a slightly different role in the “harmony.” I also got a power strip with three USB ports to power the boards all at once.
My next steps would probably be to clean up the wiring, use new speakers, put into some kind of container/box, and to program them with actual sound rather than just tones.