Maryland Music Maker

Inspiration

When you have a group of 4 marching band kids who are all passionate about music and technology, a project like the Maryland Music Maker is sure to come of it.

What it does

Our project consists of an Arduino Uno with 8 buttons (8 notes of a major scale), and a connection to headphones that we are using as makeshift speakers. We then wrote Arduino code that allows us the manually use the buttons to play it like a piano, and using standard input you can change the buttons to any key.

We also pre programmed all of the scales and all of the University of Maryland's school songs (Victory, The Fight Song, Maryland My Maryland, and The Alma Mater), with an additional second version of The Fight Song that includes two headphone speakers.

Challenges we ran into

With an Arduino all sound output is going to be in square wave form, which in general sounds pretty terrible, so our biggest issue was getting it to sound good. It took a lot of tinkering and careful coding but eventually we were able to find the correct amount of resistors and frequencies to optimize the sound.

We needed a platform to connect the songs and the piano. None of us had worked extensively with Arduino I/O, so figuring out how to format and store the input and use it to either play the piano or school songs was difficult. Our next biggest challenge was to connect two sound outputs to our piano and be able to simultaneously play the melody of a song and its counter melody. When using sound in Arduino, one would generally call the tone and delay functions on a speaker output for a certain period of time to output sound, but nothing else could be executed until the delay function terminated. So, we had to figure out what programs existed that we could use to help with the concurrency issue. After spending time researching and digging around, we were able to find a library we could use to help us accomplish our goal.

What we learned

None of the four of us had ever gone to Hackathon prior to this year's Bitcamp, so none of us knew what to expect. We had an idea in our head's of what we wanted to implement when we first arrived, but our idea was quite different than how the final product turned out. We learned that projects will evolve over time as teams run into issues that can't be solved. We also didn't realize how many people and sponsors would be out there just for us whenever we needed it. Overall, as first time Hackers, Bitcamp was an extremely positive experienced that has opened many doors for each of our futures.

Built With

• arduino
• tone.h