Dodepan is a hexagon formed lo-fi musical instrument from TuriSc which is powered by our favourite microcontroller, the Raspberry Pi Pico. Utilizing twelve inputs and one sensor, this unassuming instrument creates lo-fi beats to relax to and turns into a MIDI instrument.
The venture, Dodepan makes use of 12 capacitive contact pads, related to an MPR121 capacitive contact module, as inputs, and TuriSc states that “the bottom word it will probably produce is C2 (Midi quantity 36), the very best D8 (Midi quantity 110), so its chromatic vary is 75 notes.” The important thing may be modified utilizing a knob, together with one in every of 16 scales on one other knob. There may be as much as six concurrent voices (polyphonic) without delay and every of the inputs are assigned a word primarily based on the present scale and key. What does that imply? Nicely in brief, it will probably make music from a variety of beeps and tones.
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Music is all about expression, which is why typically performers will use motion to change the word in play — suppose guitarists shaking the neck of the guitar to offer it a warbling sound. With Dodepan, TuriSc has included an MPU-6050 Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) to transform the convert the depth of tapping the unit into velocity knowledge. This knowledge is then used to vary the amount of the notes. The IMU additionally supplies accelerometer knowledge which is used to carry out pitch bending. An onboard Li-ion battery is fed energy by way of a TP4056 (a linear charger for single cell lithium ion), an element generally discovered for pennies on Aliexpress.
The Raspberry Pi Pico is Dodepan’s core. It takes the entire knowledge (inputs, knobs, IMU) and shows the information by way of LEDs and makes use of Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) to generate the sound. That is then fed to an analog circuit for additional processing earlier than reaching a PAM8403 amplifier and speaker. If you wish to jam will on the commute, plug in some headphones and make your music to go.
Dodepan is not only a one-trick pony. It will also be used as a MIDI enter, sending knowledge to appropriate purposes utilizing the usual MIDI format. The code which holds this venture collectively is written in C.
You’ll be able to construct your individual model of this superior venture as TuriSc has documented the construct, Invoice of Supplies (BoM) and the code on their GitHub repository.