New Technology: Lily Pad Arduino (30 Day Blogging Challenge: Day 2)

Yesterday's prompt was to reflect upon a new piece of technology that I want to try and to explain how I might use it.  Although this post is a day late, I spent the afternoon teaching myself how to program a musical composition, using my LilyPad Arduino.

This summer, when I started playing around with an Arduino Uno, I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as I enjoy the LilyPad Arduino. Perhaps it's because I like the idea that I can sew the components into art projects!  I'd like to learn more about programming with the LilyPad, because I want to integrate blinking lights into art projects that I'm working on.  I'd like to learn how to easily move between my Arduino Uno and my LilyPad Arduino to solve problems and increase my understanding of how to write my own code.

Today, I sat down with the book, Sew Electric, and I used it to get started on programming music. As was suggested by the book, I created variables for my music notes, because they were easier to work with than the numbers assigned to different frequencies.  Since I didn't want to be limited by the frequencies printed in the book, I found a lovely cheat sheet of Arduino frequencies and their corresponding notes online that helped make this easier.

Then,  I played around with the tones to compose my version of Sarah McLaughlin's song, "Ice Cream," which reminds me of my daughter.

Although this is not a visually engrossing video, you can hear the song if you want to.   In the near future, I will try to revise my code to match blinking lights with the song.