What is it?

Discover the ultimate form of indie music with a one-of-a-kind kit that never plays the same song twice! At the center of this expansion kit is a tiny Integrated Circuit (IC) called a microcontroller which has a central processing unit (CPU) and instructions to randomly create musical ditties. Push the button and you will hear one of several styles, rhythms, and tenors crafted to delight and entertain. Be sure to stick around for the LASER BASS DRUM!

Concepts covered by this kit:

• Intro to microcontrollers
• Direct digital synthesis (DDS)
• Pulse Width Modulation (PWM)
• Button debouncing

This kit relies heavily on the components found in the base kit Awesome analog audio! : EDU-KIT-01 to power the IC and amplify the sound. You must have the base kit to be able to use this expansion kit. If you already own the base kit, you can buy this expansion on its own.

Why did you make it?

A bit of history- this project is a resurrection of the original “Random Music Box” featured in Makezine (https://makezine.com/projects/random-music-box/). I've modernized that project with a modern STM32 32-bit microcontroller (previously PIC 8-bit), and a whole new library of sounds and melodies for the code to draw from.

I think this is a really simple and fun project that was fun to develop and I hope to share the joy of endless digital music to others.

What makes it special?

Unlike nearly every musical electronic device plays from a pre-recorded sequence of audio waveforms or notes. The microcontroller in this kit does not use any pre-recorded songs but instead, randomly generates songs according to some carefully crafted rules whenever the button is pushed. This means you will never hear the same song twice! As with the base kit, this kit comes with a manual with full color assembly diagrams and analysis how the circuits work.