Create Musical Instrument

Description

You can turn RasPad 3 into a game screen playing with your friends, a smart alarm showing the weather and time, a display monitoring your robot’s action and many other things.

This article will show you how to DIY a Musical Instrument with your RasPad 3. Let’s take a look!

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Required Components

  • A RasPad 3

  • 8G+ SD Card

  • Scratch 3 (either online or offline)

  • Micro SD Card Reader

  • 40 Pin Ribbon Cable

  • T-Type GPIO Extension Board

  • Breadboard

  • Button

  • 10k Ohm Resistor

  • Several Jumper Wires

You Will Learn

  • Use note functions on Scratch.

  • Input the button value from the GPIO pins.

Lesson Guide

Build the Circuit

First connect the GPIO Extension Board, please read GPIO Extension Board for specific steps.

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Insert the T-type GPIO extension board into the breadboard and build the circuit as shown below.

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Programming with Scratch 3

Insert the SD card into the slot of RasPad 3，and then long press the power button to boot the RasPad 3.

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Warning

The card slot is set on the back cover and it’s in snap style. Therefore before opening or closing the back cover, you need to take out the microSD card to avoid damaging your microSD card and the internal button board.

On the left of Scratch 3 main page are some neatly arranged blocks with which you can drag to program. In this project, we need to add in other two functions: Music and Raspberry Pi GPIO. The Music function to play instruments and drums, and the Raspberry Pi GPIO function can be used to control the whole pins of Raspberry Pi.

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Tap Add icon at lower left corner and choose Music and Raspberry Pi GPIO to add two functions on the left of the main page of the Scratch 3.

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Finished the program.

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Press these three buttons on the breadboard and there emits the tones “Do, Re, Mi”.

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If you hate reading, see this video.

In this article, we introduce how to use RasPad 3 to create musical instrument. Surely, you can exert all your imagination and inspiration to upgrade your musical instrument, for example you can add more buttons, notes and an LED to make a cool music box.