Arduino Piezo Knock Sensor Play Tones

Question

I would like to hook up several piezos to an arduino so that, when they are activated each piezo plays/triggers a separate tone. For instance, I'll have five piezos connected to the arduino - when I apply pressure to each one they play a separate note, either through a software interface on a computer or from the piezos themselves. Basically an Arduino synth using piezos as keys.

I'm just not quite sure how to go about doing this. I'm sure its possible but just need a push in the right direction. Any ideas? Thanks!

Answer 1

The practical difficulty of using one device as both an input sensor and output device, is that once activated to output (a sound) you would have to disable using it as input for some fixed time. Something more responsive would be to use separate sensors for the keys, and just one speaker for all sounds. The good folks who came up the Arduino tutorials have a 3 key sensor player example here: http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/Tone3

and another example of using a piezo as a sound sensor here: http://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/KnockSensor

Answer 2

I can Help you with the Software interface , You can use your smart phone to play sounds for each Piezo Sensor. See this app : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ram.mere.DoDuino You can connect arduino using Serial ( Android 3.1 and higher ) or Bluetooth to this app.

And to use the Sound Action follow this tutorial : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQhx6qBElVk

. So you specify what sound to be played on your android phone , and when you detect which piezo you send data to the android and then the Sound Specified will be played .

So for example if android App Received : #p1; then it will played the sound related to Piezo one and when you send #s1; then it will stop playing that sound ..etc.

Hope this help someone :D .