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 sit back to and turns into a MIDI instrument.
The undertaking, Dodepan makes use of 12 capacitive contact pads, linked to an MPR121 capacitive contact module, as inputs, and TuriSc states that “the bottom observe it will probably produce is C2 (Midi quantity 36), the best D8 (Midi quantity 110), so its chromatic vary is 75 notes.” The important thing might be modified utilizing a knob, together with considered one of 16 scales on one other knob. There might be as much as six concurrent voices (polyphonic) directly and every of the inputs are assigned a observe based mostly on the present scale and key. What does that imply? Nicely briefly, it will probably make music from a spread of beeps and tones.
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Music is all about expression, which is why generally performers will use motion to change the observe in play — assume 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 information. This information is then used to vary the quantity of the notes. The IMU additionally supplies accelerometer information 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), a component generally discovered for pennies on Aliexpress.
The Raspberry Pi Pico is Dodepan’s core. It takes all the information (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 may also be used as a MIDI enter, sending information to suitable purposes utilizing the usual MIDI format. The code which holds this undertaking collectively is written in C.
You’ll be able to construct your personal model of this superior undertaking as TuriSc has documented the construct, Invoice of Supplies (BoM) and the code on their GitHub repository.
