BBC MiCROBIT PIANO User's Manual

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INTRODUCTION

Micro: bit is an ARM-based embedded system designed by the BBC of England,

which is equipped with Bluetooth, accelerometer, electronic compass, three buttons,

and a display consisting of 5x5 LED lattice. It is mainly used for computer education

addressed to teenagers.

You can use the BBC micro: bit to build any cool gadgets, whether it's a robot or a

musical instrument, you can make anything you can imagine.

This product is a mini piano expansion board which is based on micro:bit. The

board features the capacitive touch TTP229 chip, with 13 piano keys and 4 RGB lights.

You will be able to play the full octave by touching the piano keys, and the RGB LED will

display accordingly.

FEATURES

Touch Controller: TTP229

Control Interface: I2C

RGB LED: WS2812B

Dimension: 85mm x56mm

Operating Voltage: 3.3V

INTERFACE

PIN Description

VCC 3.3V

GND Ground

P0 Buzzer

P1 RGB LED

P19 I2C Clock

USE GUIDE

HOW TO USE IT

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BBC MiCROBIT PIANOUser's Manual

Piano for micro:bit User Manual

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As for its use, micro:bit officially recommends two programming methods:

http://microbit.org/code/

As you can see, the official recommendation is to use JavaScript and Python. In

their website, there are examples of these two programming languages. Click on “Let’s

Code” to open the corresponding official website.

JAVASCRIPT

Use any browser to open Micro:bit's website as shown below.

https://makecode.microbit.org/

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http://microbit.org/code/

https://makecode.microbit.org/


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Click “Projects”, then “My stuff” and “New Project” to create a new project. Also, you can

import previous projects, or refer to other people's projects and examples;

On the left of micro:bit, there’s an analog display area. When the corresponding blocks are

placed in the building blocks area, its dynamic effects will be displayed in response to them.

In the middle of the selecting area there are some common building blocks packages.

Respectively, these are the basic functions, input, music, LED lights, Radio, loops, logic, variables,

and Math and Control. By combining them together it can be achieved any kind of interesting

effects. There are also more advanced control blocks further below. Thus, mastering the basic

building blocks will allow the student to explore deeper levels of control.

On the right side is the block programming operation area, you can see two options on the

top: Blocks and JavaScript. Click on “Blocks” to place blocks inside. Click on “JavaScript” to see

generated code. Little students not familiar with JavaScript should better use “Blocks”. By default,

in Blocks, you can place the blocks you need in the placement area. Let’s micro:bit display!

INSTALL A BUILDING BLOCK PACKAGE

After the most basic operations introduction is done, let’s get straight the point. What do

we need to do with our new piano module?

First click “Advanced” and scroll to the bottom to find and click “Add Package” .

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In the pop-up box, note that the url should be added with a space:

https://github.com/waveshare/TouchPiano

On the searching result, click “piano for micro:bit”. This way you’ll have added the blocks to

control the piano module.

Next, we will continue installing the “Neopixel” block package, which is the control module

of the RGB lights. Similarly, click on “Advanced”->“Add Package”, then input in the popup

window the following url: https://github.com/Microsoft/pxt-neopixel

The last two installed libraries will appear on the left of the blank space.

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https://github.com/waveshare/TouchPiano

https://github.com/Microsoft/pxt-neopixel


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BASIC USE

Clicking on “WSTouchPiano” you should see as below:

The functions of each block are as follows:

Hereby declare: the following are sample tutorials.

1. PLAYING PIANO

Placement steps

Go to “Basic”, and place “forever” slot into the blank space on the right. Place the “Play

Piano” block of WSTouchPiano inside the “forever” slot. Click “Download” button on the bottom

left to save the project, move the .hex file to the micro:bit drive to transfer the code into your

micro:bit, and insert micro:bit to Piano's interface module. Now, you can observe our experiment

outcome!

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Removing blocks and slots:

Move back those blocks or slots that are not needed in the programming area to the block

selection area on the left.

Experiment phenomenon

Touch the white piano keys from left to right, and in turn, DO, RE, MI, FA, SOL, LA, SI, DO.

On each time you touch, the RBG LED lights up different colors. Of course, when you touch the

key is in between of two white keys, it’ll produce a tone higher than the key is on its left, and a

tone lower that the key is on its right.

2 DETERMINE KEY PRESSING.

Placement steps

Within “Logic” package, place “if then” slot to the right area. This block is used to make a

logic evaluation. If a given event is true, “then” performs some action. On the “if then” slot, click

the blue button next to “if”. This will pop up a small box. Drag the “else if” slot from within this

small box to the “if then” slot on the right. Go to Basic, and drag the “show leds” block to “then”

inside, and click on the corresponding LED for red.


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When touching the piano key C, micro:bit will display “C”, if you touch D, then micro:bit will

also display D, if nothing is touched, it won’t displaying anything.

3 CONTROLLING RGB LED COLORS

Placement steps

Here we will omit some of the basics as they are mentioned above in this tutorial.

Drag the “set LED_Color” 4-row block directly off the WSTouchPiano. Here the difference is

at the back of each LED_Color. Add to the back of each LED_color block 4 new blocks as follows.

LED1 and LED2, which are in WSTPPiano, and LED3 and LED4 by clicking “… More” just under

Neopixel

Note that: right after red, green, blue there’s a small field to fill in numbers. In fact this block

is made of the composition of the three primary colors called RGB. Each color can set a

brightness level of 256, within the range 0-255. By combining 3 different colors range, it can

produce 256 x 256 x 256 different colors. You can look up color table on the Internet for each

corresponding color combination.


When a piano key C is pressed, the four LEDs on the board will light in red, green, yellow

and blue respectively.

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4 CONTROLLING THE BUZZER

Placement steps

Drag off the “play tone” block from “Music” and click the first parameter. A piano keyboard

will show up. Click the Middle C. The second parameter is used for tone length, which is the

beat.


When the C key is pressed, the buzzer will ring one DO beat note.

LANGUANGE

If you are not used to read in English, you can set to other language like Chinese as follows:

At the top, click on the “gear symbol” -> Language, in the pop-up window, scroll down and

select simplified Chinese (China). That will set up the interface to Chinese language.

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USING THE PYTHON

Visit the official python programming website of micro:bit: http://python.microbit.org/v/1

You can see the following interface.

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http://python.microbit.org/v/1


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In turn, written above you can see the corresponding picture:

Download: Download the program to micro:bit.

Save: Save the python program to the computer.

Load: upload the local python program to the editor.

Snippets: These are the definitions and usages of common statements.

Help: Ask for Help with a more detailed description of the editor's usage.

You can download the program from the product information corresponding to our

website, and upload the WSTouchPiano is in the folder to the editor.

Within Visual Programming there are the following functions.

TouchPress()：Listens to the key press and return the corresponding key value.

ShowRGB (RGB): Displays the color of four corresponding lights, where RGB are four tuples with

three elements each, that is (0, 255, 255), (0, 255, 255), (0, 255, 255), (0, 255, 255).

PlayPiano(): Keeps listening to key pressing. When the key is pressed, the four RGB lights up any

random colors, as well as the buzzer emits the corresponding sound at the same time.

For learning more about control functions, please refer to micro:bit official python library, If you

don't know the python library, you can find micro:bit's python library in the following places:

https://github.com/bbcmicrobit/micropython

http://microbit-micropython.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

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https://github.com/bbcmicrobit/micropython

http://microbit-micropython.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

1

1

2

2

3

3

4

4

D D

C C

B B

A A

1M

R11M

R21M

R31M

R41M

R51M

R61M

R71M

R8

GND K0

K1

K2

K3

K4

K5

K6

K7

100nF

C7GND

aveshareW

SLPSENA1

TP32

TP23

SENADJ04

TP15

TP06

TP157

TP148

SENADJ39

TP1310

TP1211

SDA12

SDO13

SCL14 SLPSENB 15TP11 16TP10 17SENADJ2 18TP9 19TP8 20TEST 21TP7 22TP6 23SENADJ1 24TP5 25TP4 26VDD 27VSS 28U1

TTP229L

0-50pFC1

0-50pFC2

0-50pFC4

0-50pFC3

0-50pFC5

0-50pFC6GND

GND

GND

SDO

TEST

K0K1

K2K3

K4K5

K6K7

K8K9

K10K11

K12K13

K14K15

10K

R10

10K

R11Micro:bit Piano Board

1 23 45 67 89 1011 1213 1415 1617 1819 2021 2223 2425 2627 2829 3031 3233 3435 3637 3839 4041 4243 4445 4647 4849 5051 5253 5455 5657 5859 6061 6263 6465 6667 6869 7071 7273 7475 7677 7879 8081 82

H41

H41

3V3

GND

GND

LED1/P3 LED1/P3P0 P0

LED2/P4 LED2/P4KEY_A/P5 KEY_A/P5LED9/P6LED8/P7P1

P2

GND

P8LED7/P9LED3P10KEY_B/P11P12

SCK/P13MISO/P14MOSI/P15P16

SCL/P19SDA/P20

3V3/P173V3

GND

GND

LED9/P6LED8/P7P1

P2

GND

P8LED7/P9LED3P10KEY_B/P11P12

SCK/P13MISO/P14MOSI/P15P16

SCL/P19SDA/P20

3V3/P17

3V3/P18 3V3/P18SDA/P20

SCL/P19

3V3

3V3

3V3

P0

12

Buzzer

B1

180R13

SDA/P20

SCL/P19

10uF/25V

C8

Q1NPN_SOT23

GND

3V3

D11N4148

GND

VDD

DOUTVSS

DIN

L1

WS2812B

VDD

DOUTVSS

DIN

L2

WS2812B

VDD

DOUTVSS

DIN

L3

WS2812B

P1

3V3

GND GND

VDD

DOUTVSS

DIN

L4

WS2812BGND

PIANO_B

PIANO_A

PIANO_A#

PIANO_G#PIANO_GPIANO_F#

PIANO_FPIANO_E

PIANO_D#PIANO_D

PIANO_C#PIANO_C

PIANO_C1

123456

H1

Header 6

3V3GNDP0P1SCL/P19SDA/P20

123456

H2

Header 6

3V3GND

SCK/P13MISO/P14MOSI/P15

P2

Micro:bit GPIO

RGB LED

Buzzer

Touch

I2C

BBC MiCROBIT PIANO User's Manual

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