Glock around the clockenspiel

Are you a primary or secondary teacher in the UK? Do you want some free CPD? Apply to join our free Raspberry Picademy here at Pi Towers in Cambridge with our amazing education team: closing date for applications is March 28.  Ivan Roulson from RPi Kitchen (really worth some of your time this afternoon if you fancy browsing your way around some rather excellent Pi projects) was at the local recycling centre earlier this year, when he came upon an abandoned glockenspiel. There are so many places this story could go from here, but you’ve probably already guessed what happened next. Ivan took that sad glockenspiel home and gave it a Pi for brains. He designed and built some hammers, and hooked up a motor mechanism and some rubber bands to make the hammers snap back up once they’d made contact. Ivan then proceeded to make the whole apparatus dingle-dongle its way through some sweet, sweet music using Python. The motors are hooked up to the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins using two ULN2803 Darlington driver ICs – Ivan’s plan is to build a dedicated PCB to do the job. This is not the first glockenspiel project we’ve seen (Mike Cook produced one a couple of years ago, with instructions you can follow to reproduce the project at home), but we very much liked the mechanism Ivan built to make his setup work. We’re dying to see a project where someone adapts Sonic Pi to interface with GPIO: seeing some of you replace the pretty-bell command with an honest-to-god real-world bell would make our day. Any takers?

URL: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/6524?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=glock-around-the-clockenspiel