Book Image

Arduino BLINK Blueprints

By : Utsav Shah
Book Image

Arduino BLINK Blueprints

By: Utsav Shah

Overview of this book

Arduino is an open-source prototyping platform based on easy-to-use hardware and software. Arduino has been used in thousands of different projects and applications by a wide range of programmers and artists, and their contributions have added up to an incredible amount of accessible knowledge that can be of great help to novices and experts alike. Want to build exciting LED projects with Arduino? This book will be your companion to bring out the creative genius in you. To begin with, you will get introduced to the maker movement and the open source hardware development Arduino boards. You will then move on to develop a mood lamp and a remote-controlled TV backlight. As you progress through the book, you will develop an LED cube and will learn to use sound visualization to develop a sound-controlled LED Christmas tree. You will then move on to build a persistence of vision wand. At the end of each chapter, you’ll see some common problems, their solutions, and some workarounds.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Introduction to sound visualization


Sound visualization, or music visualization, has been an integral part of the music industry since the evolution of media players. For example, on your computer, when you play any music, you can see the visualization in the default media player or VLC media player, as shown in the following image:

You have noticed that, as the loudness of the music, or the frequency of the sound changes, the visualization changes. We will use the same principle to visualize sound using Arduino.

How to visualize the sound

In simple terms, sound/music is nothing but a series of signals with a certain frequency and a certain amplitude. We can get the value at each point by using analogRead(). But, this function would be much too slow for sampling audio. So, we will use the microcontroller's analog-to-digital converter, which automatically takes repeated analog intervals at precise intervals. We will learn both ways of sampling audio. There are a number of algorithms available...