Boom Box

Challenge

In this exercise, we are going to bring inputs and outputs together to make a musical instrument. Microbit can play music using the music.play function and can get input from buttons or from the touch inputs on the edge connector. Wire a speaker or a pair of headphones between pin 0 and and on the edge of the microbit before running.

Requirements

• Crocodile clips and a speaker or headphones to play the music through.

Notes

• play - music.play accepts a list of musical note and duration pairs, use “R” to rest between notes.
• buttons - the microbit has two buttons, a and b, was_pressed can be used to ask if a button has been pressed since the microbit started or the last time you asked.
• pins - the pins 0, 1 and 2 are touch enabled so that the microbit can tell if you touch one of them while touching the gnd pin with your other hand. We are using pin 0 for the loudspeaker output so we only have pins 1 and 2 available for input.

Extensions

• Change which notes are played
• Play more notes each time a pin is touched.
• Play random notes each time a pin is touched
• Play a random tune using music.play and one of the pre-prepared items like music.NYAN

Example Solution

Show Solution

from microbit import *
import music

while True:
    if pin1.is_touched() and pin2.is_touched():
        tune = ["C4:4"]
        music.play(tune)
    elif pin1.is_touched():
        tune = ["G4:4"]
        music.play(tune)
    elif pin2.is_touched():
        tune = ["A4:4"]
        music.play(tune)
    elif button_a.was_pressed():
        tune = ["F4:4"]
        music.play(tune)
    elif button_b.was_pressed():
        tune = ["E4:4"]
        music.play(tune)

    sleep(100)