Planet Arduino

Percussion instruments are likely the first kind that humanity invented, because they’re quite simple: hit a thing and a noise happens. Different things produce different frequencies with different timbres, and glass bottles have a nice xylophonic sound to them. Because glass bottles are easy to find among discarded garbage, Jens of the Jens Maker Adventures YouTube channel took advantage of them to build this awesome robotic instrument.

Jens started by collecting a bunch of different bottles. He tapped each to while searching to get a sense of the notes they produced, which he could then lower by adding some water to fine tune the pitch. Once he had enough bottles to cover a range of notes, he set out to construct a robot to play them.

Solenoid actuators tap each bottle and an Arduino UNO Rev3 board controls that tapping. It does so according to MIDI files created in the popular Ableton software. Jens matched the available notes in Ableton to those produced by the glass bottles, so he could simply compose melodies using those notes knowing that the robot could play them. The Arduino reads the MIDI files output by Ableton and strikes the corresponding bottles.

Finally, Jens laser-cut a plywood frame and enclosure that holds the bottles, the Arduino, and the solenoids. It works with seven bottles, which is the number of notes this machine can play.

Jens demonstrated that by playing a guitar along with the robotic instrument and the result sounds very pleasant — especially for something made with garbage.

The post This robot turns old bottles into a musical instrument appeared first on Arduino Blog.

If your young child wants to listen to music, what better way than a beautiful wooden MP3 “radio,” with an array of buttons that select the album? After being inspired by a similar commercial product, Redditor “DerThes” decided to make such a device for a fraction of the cost using an Arduino Uno for control, along with a Music Maker Shield to play off an SD card.

The toddler can select tunes from a grid of 16 input buttons, which are sent to the Uno via a pair of shift registers. There’s also a “parent’s mode” with the ability to choose from up to 99 albums, and a volume knob for… adjusting the volume. 

Finally, the unt features a beautiful enclosure made out of oak and black walnut, with corners softened by dowels to reduce collateral damage “after the player has gone airborne.” More details can be seen on Imgur here and on GitHub.

This is an easy to use MP3 player for small children. I made this for my 2 year old for Christmas. Each of the top 9 buttons will play an album. The black buttons on the bottom are prev – play/pause – next. The player also supports an alternative playback mode that can be activated using a special key combination. That combination will turn the buttons into a 10 digit input matrix allowing playback of up to 99 albums. That way the player can be used by parents as well.

See GitHub for more details, the schematics for the button PCB and the firmware. https://github.com/MichaelThessel/arduino-stoerbert

This is heavily inspired by Hoerbert: https://en.hoerbert.com

When I first saw the Hoerbert at a friends place I wanted it for my child. After I heard of the $400 price tag I knew that I needed to spend 50 hrs and $100 to build my own.

Music, food, and coding style have one thing in common: we all have our own preferences. On the other hand, there are arguably more people on this planet than there are varieties in any one of those categories, so we rarely fail to find like-minded folks sharing at least some of our taste. Well, in case your idea of a good time is calling a service hotline for some exquisite tunes, [Fuzzy Wobble] and his hold music jukebox, appropriately built into a telephone, is just your guy.

Built around an Arduino with an Adafruit Music Maker shield, [Fuzzy Wobble] uses the telephone’s keypad as input for selecting one of the predefined songs to play, and replaced the phone’s bell with a little speaker to turn it into a jukebox. For a more genuine experience, the audio is of course also routed to the handset, although the true hold music connoisseur might feel disappointed about the wide frequency range and lack of distortion the MP3s used in his example provide. Jokes aside, projects like these are a great reminder that often times, the journey really is the reward, and the end result doesn’t necessarily have to make sense for anyone to enjoy what you’re doing.

As these old-fashioned phones gradually disappear from our lives, and even the whole concept of landline telephony is virtually extinct in some parts of the world already, we can expect to see more and more new purposes for them. Case in point, this scavenger hunt puzzle solving device, or the rotary phone turned virtual assistant.