Concept
For this assignment, we were inspired by the toy pianos that we’ve all played with at least a few times as children. These toys were often quite limited, as they only had enough space to accommodate the keys for a single octave. We decided to create a miniature piano that could play the notes from C to A, with a knob that can be turned to change octaves.
Setup and Code
We set up a row of buttons that play a note when pressed, a potentiometer that changes the octave, and a switch that switches the notes to their respective sharp notes.
We created arrays that store the frequencies of the natural notes across seven octaves, doing the same for the sharp notes. The range of the potentiometer is mapped to a range of 0-6 and determines which octave the notes will be played in. When the switch is low, natural notes are played, and vice versa.
To prevent the notes from continuously playing, the noTone() function stops the buzzer playing any sound when no button is pressed.
if (buttonState7 == LOW && buttonState6 == LOW && buttonState5 == LOW &&
buttonState4 == LOW && buttonState3 == LOW && buttonState2 == LOW) {
noTone(8); // Stop any tone on pin 8
}
Demo
Vid link
Reflection
Overall, this group project was a success as we managed to recreate our inspiration using Arduino. We were really satisfied with how we made sure to implement the natural notes as well as sharp notes in our project. A few struggles we faced was that the wires and resistors were really crowded on our small breadboards, making it a little difficult to reach the buttons. Ideally, we would want to get bigger breadboards in the future so that there would be more room for interacting with the product. Additionally, the bread board was just a little too small for us to add the 7th natural note, so we could only fit 6, as we’re missing a B note.
In the future, we would like to add two different colored led lights that switch on and off along with the natural or sharp notes. This way, it would help users know if they are currently playing natural or sharp notes, as not everyone is familiar with musical notes in that sense.