affordable stuff gets our innovative juices flowing. situation in point? [Andy Grove] developed an eight-sensor HC-SR04 breakout board, since the ultrasonic distance sensors in concern are so economical that a hacker can barely prevent ordering them by the dozen. He originally developed it for robotics, however then it’s just a few lines of code to turn it into a gesture-controllable musical instrument. inspect out the video, embedded below, for an overview of the features.
His Octasonic breakout board is just an AVR in disguise — it reads from eight ultrasonic sensors as well as delivers a single SPI result to whatever other controller is serving as the brains. In the “piano” demo, that’s a Raspberry Pi, so he needed the usual 5 V to 3.3 V level shifting in between.
The rest is code on the Pi that allows gestures to play notes, modification musical instruments, as well as even shut the Pi down. The Pi code is written in Rust, as well as up on GitHub. An Instructable has more detail on the hookups.
All in all, building a “piano” out of robot parts is surely a situation of having a hammer as well as every issue appearing like a nail, however we discover a few of the resulting nail-sculptures arise that way. This isn’t the very first time we’ve seen an eight-sensor ultrasonic configuration before, either. Is 2017 going to be the year of ultrasonic sensor projects?