When you're on discord or with your friends in some voice chat, you would like to make some noises and funny sounds. All current existing soundboards are ugly and only available on the computer, it's all virtual. But if you have arduino and some time to spend, why not making a physical soundboard?
With OneBoard you can easily connect your physical, arduino soundboard. Go on the latest release page and download the installer and the sketchs. Choose the preferred sketch and upload it to arduino. The sketch I used is based on capacitive sensors, inspired by musical launchpads' touch buttons.
The soundboard have only 9 buttons, more coming soon...
It works also standalone without arduino. Select the playback device on the top dropdown menu. Right click on buttons to load audio file, then simply click and the audio will reproduce on the selected device. To connect arduino select the serial port with the second dropdown menu on the top (may require a refresh) and then with the top right button connect to arduino.
The arduino sketch works based on a constant communication every 200 ms to keep the connection alive with an empty message, so to create your own sketch, download the blank example and modify only the main file, keep untouched the CheckAlive.cpp, packets.cpp and packets.h . Pay attention to call at every loop (or in compex cycles, every 1000 ms) the check method.
CheckAlive::check();Implement your own way to call events (buttons, capacitive sensor, photoresistor...), and when you are ready to touch the button call the method Packets::sendPacket("data") with your data basing on the table below.
The serial communication between OneBoard software and the arduino is based on some predefined messages, to activate buttons and other actions. The code messages must be of 6 characters, or both arduino and OneBoard will throw an error.
The standard code to press buttons is btn followed by the id of the button in the header.kv file located in "sections/screens/". The buttons ids are from b00 to b08, where b00 is at the top left corner, b02 at the top right and b08 at the bottom right.
Press button 2 (top center)
Packets::sendPacket("btnb01");Press button 06 (center right)
Packets::sendPacket("btnb05");You can implement code to pause and with the same button resume the playback.
Packets::sendPacket("pause0");Since arduino has no exceptions, when debugging, errors are useful and the program will print an error if you send code err000
If you want to add your custom functions or create a better code you have to clone the repository and install all the depencencies, and you will be ready to make your changes. After cloning/downloading/forking the repository, you have to install the dependencies with
pip install -r requirements.txt
This will install all the dependencies except Pyaudio, that is difficoult to compile with pip. It's preferred to download the pre-built binaries from this site. I used the version amd64 for python 3.8 (PyAudio‑0.2.11‑cp38‑cp38‑win_amd64.whl).
If you want to compile Pyaudio yourself, you need to install PortAudio and Visual Studio compiler (for more info read this).