A Crumble powered instrument that can play a tune? You must be mad!
Don’t worry, we thought we were too, but after having this idea in our head for a long time, we finally bought a glockenspiel to try it out- and lo and behold our Crumble powered glockenspiel is alive.
Surprisingly, you don’t need many parts to make the instrument work. A glockenspiel with a beater, two servos, some cable ties and a sticky pad or two. We placed it on a spare piece of corriflute so that we could keep the servos and the glockenspiel aligned.
We needed two servos for this. One servo with the “cross” attachment, and the other with the “double arm”. These were then wired into the Crumble, one on A and the other on B.
The two servos were then connected with sticky pads and cable ties. The bottom servo moves along the X axis (left to right), and the top servo along the Y axis (up and down).
To allow us to easily play the given notes, we created a variable for each one and worked out, through trial and error, which notes were at which angle.
We then moved onto setting out variables for a crotchet, a minim, and then the angles at which the top servo needs to be to hit the glockenspiel, and where it should rest at.
This is the block of code to hit the ‘F’ key, for one crotchet (same as the beat). The total of the wait statements is 750 milliseconds, which equals 80bpm.
And there you have it, one Crumble-powered Glockenspiel! Our instrument came with some free music, so we decided to use one of those pieces. After piecing together many snippets of code, here is Beethoven’s 9th Symphony – well the first line, in all of its Crumble-y glory.
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