Skip to main content

'Dancing' Snowman - ok flashing LEDs to music



This post discusses a project that I want to play with since finding out the new Microbit V2 has an built in microphone - this is to use the new microbit in combination with a Ryan Walmsley's SnowPi RGB https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanwalmsley/snowpi-rgb-edition to make the snow,man change the LEDs as the music's volume changes via the microphone. First though, thank to you to the fabulous  Rachel @ItsAll_Geek2Me from Microbit Education Foundation for letting me have Microbits to play with.


So thehe starting point is the Snowman, essentially following the instructions at snowpi.xyz for setting it up and writing an initial program in makecode for the snowman. If fact the code in this project is a twist on the code found there.


You need to use https://makecode.microbit.org/beta#editor at the time of writing and add the neopixels extension (see snowpi.xyz for more details) Some new blocks in the current beta version of makecode add for the new microbit; including some new blocks for the microphone under inputs - a very useful resource for details on the new microbit and programming it is https://tech.microbit.org/latest-revision/ the microphone blocks are in the input section.
 
The code is availabe at https://makecode.microbit.org/_KDo9KghUhPbw  it is a bit hard to see the code in the images below.
 

 

 
 






 
If you do something more with this code please add a comment to the post.



All opinions in this blog are the Author's and should not in any way be seen as reflecting the views of any organisation the Author has any association with. Twitter @scottturneruon

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Robot Software

In the previous blog posts for this 'series' "It is a good time...."  Post 1  looked at the hardware unpinning some of this positive rise in robots; Post 2  looked at social robots; Post 3  looked at a collection of small robots; Post 4 looked at further examples of small robots Robots, such as the forthcoming Buddy and JIBO, will be based some established open sourceand other technologies. Jibo will be based around various technologies including Electron and JavaScript (for more details see:  http://blog.jibo.com/2015/07/29/jibo-making-development-readily-accessible-to-all-developers/ ). Buddy is expected to be developed around tools for Unity3d, Arduino and OpenCV, and support Python, C++, C#, Java and JavaScript (for more details see http://www.roboticstrends.com/article/customize_your_buddy_companion_robot_with_this_software_development_kit ).  This post contin ues with some of the software being used with the smaller robots.  A number ...
1 comment
Read more

Speech Recognition in Scratch 3 - turning Hello into Bonjour!

The Raspberry Pi Foundation recently released a programming activity Alien Language , with support Dale from Machine Learning for Kids , that is a brilliant use of Scratch 3 - Speech Recognition to control a sprite in an alien language. Do the activity, and it is very much worth doing, and it will make sense! I  would also recommend going to the  machinelearningforkids.co.uk   site anyway it is full of exciting things to do (for example loads of activities  https://machinelearningforkids.co.uk/#!/worksheets  ) . Scratch 3 has lots of extensions that are accessible through the Extension button in the Scratch 3 editor (see below) which add new fun new blocks to play with. The critical thing for this post is  Machine Learning for Kids  have created a Scratch 3 template with their own extensions for Scratch 3 within it  https://machinelearningforkids.co.uk/scratch3/ . One of which is a Speech to Text extension (see below). You must use this one ...
5 comments
Read more

Scratch and web-cams in Scratch 3

Scratch 3 was launched on 2nd January 2019, so I wanted to know would Webcams still work with Scratch 3 as it did with Scratch 2. For example, in a previous post  Scratch, webcams, cats and explosions  the cat (Scratch) moved across the screen and a button burst when the object moved in the camera onto it.  Can the same thing be done in Scratch 3? The short answer is yes, but it is done slightly differently. The first change the video capture is not there in the blocks automatically; but is an extension that needs to be added. First, you need to add the extension blocks for video sensing. Go to the little icon at the bottom left of the screen (as shown below) this takes you to the extensions menu. Next, find the Video Sensing option and selected. The webcam, if enabled, with start automatically. A video sensing set of blocks is now in the list of block options.  The rest is very similar to doing this in Scratch 2. Moving ...
3 comments
Read more