Concept
In this assignment I worked with Mohamed to design a musical instrument using the arduino and breadboard. We used two main devices which are the piezo speaker and the servo motor. We decided to play the song “We will we will rock you” on the piezo buzzer, and then provide sound effects after that using the servo motor, by rotating it clockwise and counter-clockwise. The code to do this is shown below. Here is a schematic for our implementation.
#include "pitches.h"
#include <Servo.h>
// notes in the melody:
int melody[] = {
NOTE_C4, NOTE_A3, NOTE_C4, NOTE_A3, 0, NOTE_G3, NOTE_G3,NOTE_G3
};
// note durations: 4 = quarter note, 8 = eighth note, etc.:
int noteDurations[] = {
2, 2, 2, 2, 4, 4,4
};
Servo myservo;
int pos = 0;
void setup() {
// iterate over the notes of the melody:
}
void loop() {
bool switchState=digitalRead(A3);
if(switchState){
for (int thisNote = 0; thisNote < 8; thisNote++) {
int noteDuration = 1000 / noteDurations[thisNote];
tone(8, melody[thisNote], noteDuration);
myservo.attach(9);
int pauseBetweenNotes = noteDuration * 1.30;
delay(pauseBetweenNotes);
// stop the tone playing:
noTone(8);
}
myservo.write(180); // tell servo to go to position in variable 'pos'
delay(1000*1.3); // waits 15ms for the servo to reach the position
myservo.write(0); // tell servo to go to position in variable 'pos'
delay(1000*1.3); // waits 15ms for the servo to reach the position
}
}
As seen in the above code, we tried to make the sound effects that come from the servo motor sound better, by making the delay time between the rotations equal to the pause time between the notes. To control the musical instrument, we used a digital input which is a switch that should be pressed each time to play the sounds again
We really liked how the output looked like, but we believe that we can improve on it by making the servo motor be controlling an object like a drum stick when it is rotating to make it sound as a better musical instrument. Here is a video that shows our implementation.