Inspiration
We both love to play on retro game consoles and wanted to create a project that emulates their 8 bit sound with a buzzer. After completing this first part of the project we decided it would be even better to add a frequency VU meter, which can change colour based on frequency and sound.
How we built it
The project is built with an arduino as the master controller, the LED strips which require 12 volts each were switched by 3 IRLZ44N, N channel MOSFET's so as not to fry our arduino board. The sound is produced by a passive buzzer whose volume is controlled by a 10K Ohm potentiometer.
For transcribing the songs, we used a MIDI to Python plugin that converted all notes in the song and outputted their frequency and duration. This data was then imported into Arduino IDE and then used to create the music.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest challenge was to transcribe the notes for each song. We tried several methods to do so and decided to use the MIDI files for each song and store the frequency for each note as well as the duration of the note which is then read in the program to produce the sound by the buzzer and also to control the colour of the LED strips
What we learned
We learnt how to control LED strips in arduino as well as how to produce notes of different frequency
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