Budget Rave

Inspiration

Speakers at the Convenience Store are too expensive (the good ones that is). This presents a problem for me, because for reasons unknown to me, my room has been established as the instinctively occasional hangout spot by my friends (maybe it’s because I have the biggest fridge and a microwave and a kettle for chai AND a roommate who’s hardly ever in my room). Anyways, for this assignment, I thought I’d make up for the absence of a speaker in my room by using the free speaker given to me by the university for my IM course.

Concept

I’m using an ultrasonic sensor to gauge how far an object is from the breadboard and playing different notes based on this distance. Keep in mind I don’t know the first thing about music theory so I used random notes for each distance so the music itself might not make sense. Or maybe it does and I’ve created a new wave of post-music music. Anyways, here’s a pic and the code.

Code

const int trigPin = 9;  
const int echoPin = 10;
float duration, distance; 
#include "pitches.h"

int melody[] = {
  NOTE_A1, NOTE_B2, NOTE_C3, NOTE_D4, NOTE_E5, NOTE_F3, NOTE_C4
};

void setup() {
  pinMode(trigPin, OUTPUT);  
  pinMode(echoPin, INPUT);  
  Serial.begin(9600);  
}

void loop() {
  digitalWrite(trigPin, LOW);
  delayMicroseconds(2);
  digitalWrite(trigPin, HIGH);
  delayMicroseconds(10);
  digitalWrite(trigPin, LOW);

  duration = pulseIn(echoPin, HIGH);
  distance = (duration * 0.0343) / 2;
  delay(100);

  int melodyIndex = map((int)distance, 0, 50, 0, 7);  // Adjust the range (0-50) so the notes change over a noticeable distance
  melodyIndex = constrain(melodyIndex, 0, 7);  // Ensure the index is within the valid range
  tone(8, melody[melodyIndex]);
  Serial.print("Distance: ");
  Serial.println(melodyIndex);
}

See for yourself

Here’s links to a video showing the functionality of my instrument and a bonus video of my friend discovering my instrument and easing up to the idea of raving to the melodious notes. Easter egg alert: we used the same lamp as a strobe light as the one in my previous assignment. Maybe the 100 campus dirhams weren’t a bad investment after all…

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1wF5HzdHqWylkz1_lZ35EAcVphwg50Nb9?usp=sharing