You can use the piezo speaker to play some basic sound with Arduino. Here you use the EducationShield library’s Melody class to play a melody from a list of notes and durations.

Materials

Instructions

1. Attach the shield onto the top of the Arduino board.
2. Connect the piezo across the breadboard gap.
3. Connect one leg to digital pin 8 (it does not matter which one) and the other one to GND, using jumper wires.
4. Connect the board to the computer and upload example ‘Melody’.

Code

Find the code in Example>EducationShield>Help>Melody.

What you now should hear from the piezo speaker is a short melody, silence for three seconds, a short beep, then silence for another three seconds. This should then repeat.

Commands

• #include “pitches.h” – includes the file pitches.h where the tone frequencies are declared as constants.

• Melody( digitalPin ) – creates a Melody object.
  • Parameters

    • (int) digitalPin – the digital pin to which the piezo or speaker is connected.

• play( length, notes[ ], duration[ ], tempo) – plays a melody.
  • Parameters
    • (int) length – number of notes in the melody.
    • (int[]) notes – an array holding the melody notes.
    • (int[]) duration – an array holding the duration of each note.

    • (int) tempo – tempo of the melody. Default is 1.3.

• beep() – plays a beep.

Troubleshooting

• Make sure that the piezo speaker is properly connected to a digital pin and to GND.
• Make sure you have connected the piezo to the same pin as stated in your code.