How to make music with an Arduino

Speaker: 0.25W, 8 ohms

Resistor 221 ohm

Arduino IDE

Arduino UNO

<p >In this video I explain how you can use an Arduino to make music using just a speaker and a resistor. </p><p >Like many similar projects, this one generates tones that match the notes of a piano. Unlike many of these projects, however, this one does not use a lookup table to obtain the frequencies. Instead, the tones are generated using a calculation. The calculation accepts a number from 1 through to 88. This number correlates to a key on an 88-key piano. </p><p >The Arduino library offers a tone() function which can be used to generate square-wave tones, but this function is unable to generate tones under 31Hz. An 88-key piano has a few notes with frequencies that fall below 31Hz. So, if you’d like to generate the full range of notes from an 88-key piano, the tone() function cannot be used. Instead, I will show you how to generate square-wave tones using a simple delay. </p><p >This project works at a microsecond level. A microsecond is one millionth of a second. This project makes extensive use of the Arduino library’s delayMicroseconds() function, but therein lies another minor issue, as it cannot reliably delay for more than a few thousand microseconds, which this project sometimes needs to do, so I will show you how to overcome this too. </p><p >One last thing about this project is that, despite the issues described above, the code for the project is really rather small, as the code just about fits onto a single screen (your resolution may vary!). To be fair, that is without any code comments, but a link to fully commented code is available in the video description. </p><p >I hope you enjoy this project!</p><div class="se-component se-video-container __se__float-none" contenteditable="false" style="width: 100%;"><figure style="width: 100%; height: 56.25%; padding-bottom: 56.25%; margin: 0px;"><iframe frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Z1YvIFUIhLs" data-proportion="true" data-percentage="100%,56.25%" data-size="100%,56.25%" data-align="none" style="width: 100%; height: 100%;" data-index="0" data-file-size="0" data-origin="100%,56.25%"></iframe></figure></div><p ><a href="https://youtu.be/S8TPJp_BgHc">How to install the Arduino IDE in Ubuntu</a></p>