motine/samplebox

A little device with four buttons to play music/effect samples.

samplebox

A little device with four buttons to play music/effect samples.

How it works

There are four buttons. If you press one, a sound will be played. E.g. when you press the second button, the file located under samples/02.wav will be played.
There is an additional "shift" button. If pressed it plays other sounds. E.g. pressing the second button with shift pressed, samples/06.wav is played.
The sixth button is a "control" button. If you press the first button with control held, we increase volume. The second button makes following sounds quieter and the fourth button shuts the whole system down.

Circuit

The very simplistic circuit looks like this:

I first started on a breadboard:

Then I moved on to soldering the whole stuff together:

Installation

We tested with a Raspberry PI 2 with Raspbian Jessie (lite image). Please ssh onto the machine:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales # choose your keyboard layout and language (I prefer en_US.UTF-8)
# install dependencies
sudo apt-get install python3 python3-pygame python3-rpi.gpio
# install debugging/convenience packages
sudo apt-get install raspi-gpio mplayer vim
# download repo
cd
git clone https://github.com/motine/samplebox.git
# If you want the playbox come up automatically after boot, install it as a systemd service
sudo cp samplebox/systemd/samplebox.service /etc/systemd/system/
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable samplebox
sudo systemctl start samplebox # start the service immediately
sudo systemctl status samplebox # check its status
# download sounds
cd ~/samplebox/samples
# see below
sudo systemctl restart samplebox # reload the new samples

Now you can need add sounds, because the ones provided here are just silence. To add/change sounds, please create files in the samples folder. Their filename should be a number between 1 and 8 with a leading 0. After changing samples, please restart the service (see above). The sound files must be uncompressed wav files. Example filename: samples/01.wav.

For example, please see this site to download sound effects.

Development

Please see README.Development for more details on the software part of this project.