Arduino Music Box
In my first year, I took an introductory electronics course that gave us access to
- analog circuits: circuits are closed loops featuring electronic components (such as resistors, transistors, LEDs, transistors, amplifiers); there’s also a power source that raises the voltage, pumps current, putting all the components in action.
- sensors: interactive devices (such as buttons, wheels, temperature sensor etc. ) that can sense their surroundings
- microcrontrollers: named ‘micro’ because they are small, simple, cheap computers; ‘controller’ because they are mainly are used to run simple logic to control other devices. Though it can execute code like any computer, it doesn’t have the computing power to run your laptop or phone.
After training us with all these parts and more, we were then let loose to build our own final project. I had the most fun running simple code on an Arduino Nano microcrontroller. Using an empty cigar box, I made a music box that plays mp3s from an SD card and displays its song name on a tiny screen.
This was filmed in 2011 when my phone was technologically more similar to a potato than a modern smartphone.
New skills:
- First time constructing non-trivial circuits and using equations like Ohm’s Law in real life instead in a notebook.
- C++ programming in using Arduino Integrated Development Environment (IDE) which runs the code.
Followup Questions: How does the microcontroller work? How did it interpret the mp3 file and decode into playable sounds? How to organize circuit wirings so it’s not a hot mess?
Key Takeaway: An auspicious introduction to electronics where I quickly learned that digital domain (running code on microcrontroller) is friendlier than analog domain (soldering little wires and devices together and measuring with oscilloscope).
In retrospect, this key takeaway became a catalyst for a lot of other things. First impressions DO count!
Explore posts in the same categories: Hardware, Music, Software
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