HackSpace Magazine Issue 48: Make a MIDI musical cheese box with Pico #RaspberryPi #CircuitPython @HackSpaceMag

HackSpace magazine issue 48 demonstrates a project to make a MIDI musical cheese box using a Raspberry Pi Pico programmed in CircuitPython.

Make a portable MIDI controller that you can use to create complex rhythms and musical sequences and use as a tiny keyboard. In a cheese box. The article ‘Make Music with Pico’, in HackSpace magazine issue 46, showed how easy it is to use a Raspberry Pi Pico device to send MIDI notes to a synthesizer. We are going to build on that to create a MIDI instrument, the ‘Pico musical cheese box’, as shown in Figure 1.

The musical cheese box uses a ring of twelve pixels to display notes, and twelve buttons for user input. You can use the cheese box with a synthesizer program that connects to MIDI, and there is also a specially written Pure Data patch for it.

The box contains a twelve NeoPixel ring and twelve buttons which are connected to a Raspberry Pi Pico. Each button has its own dedicated input pin on the Pico.

Read more in the latest issue of HackSpace Magazine on pages 94-99, download PDF, buy now, subscribe