Pi PICO
Build a Pi Pico electronic piano
Les Pounder is trying his best to make his mum proud by not taking apart an electronic piano!
OUR EXPERT
Les Pounder is associate editor at Tom’s Hardware and a freelance maker for hire. He blogs about his adventures and projects at http://bigl.es. YOU NEED
Pi Pico or
Pico W A buzzer 15x M2M jumper wires 7x push buttons Large breadboard
Blu Tack, modelling clay, doublesided tape
Code: https://github.com/lesp/
LXF311-Pi-Ano/archive/refs/heads/ main.zip
As I write this, Christmas is on the horizon and it’s got me thinking of my childhood. My mother bought me a small piezo-speaker piano in the hope that I would learn to play. That dream was never realised but I did learn to take it apart and see how it worked, and now we can do that using the Raspberry Pi Pico.
In this tutorial, we are going to use a Raspberry Pi Pico or Pico W running MicroPython to create a Pi-ano. We’ll use the Solfège syllables, a music education method used in schools to teach pitch and basic music comprehension. You’ll most likely know them as do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti. We will create a piano interface using seven push buttons, and using a single buzzer and some clever coding, we will produce ‘music’ to ‘delight’ our families.