Jingle Bells

Finished Product; Named after the song due to us failing to play it for 2 hours in The Innovation Studio.

About

For our final project, we decided to create an instrument centered around hanging copper tubes and solenoids. The copper tubes, of various lengths (corresponding to different pitches) are hung from the top of a wooden frame and also attached to the bottom of the frame by using fishing line to minimize movement. Solenoids provide a convenient way to strike the tubes, since they have a hammer which can be activated at our discretion. An Arduino is used as a microcontroller, and is attached to a circuit on the frame. The circuit is comprised of 2 h-bridges that control the 8 solenoids, as well as 2 different 12v power supplies (used to provide current). In order to activate the solenoids, we used Ableton Live to send data to the Arduino, either by inputting melodies directly or with a MIDI keyboard. Our code would power certain pins upon receiving 2 bytes from Ableton. The first byte would indicate the note/pitch to be played and the second byte would be the velocity. The code read this data and activated the solenoids accordingly.