Jingle Bells with a Buzzer and Arduino

Christmas is coming and everyone is about to put wonderful colored trees in their houses. This year we bought a new tree but we didn’t change all the decorating parts like balls and lights. We also had a little red and white box shaped like Santa Claus’ head that used to play Christmas jingles with some sort of a buzzer (so monotone sounds were produced). But the problem is that it broke down since it was probably too old.
Since I had an Arduino UNO at hand, I built a similar thing with it.
Here you can find the Github repo for the code.

Parts

1. Arduino Uno (or whatever version you might already have)
2. A buzzer
3. A 220Ω resistor (but you don’t need it if you want to destroy your buzzer!)
4. A case, wires, and a little breadboard

Wiring

Let’s get dirty

I started developing it with the buzzer and the resistor on the breadboard. (as you can see from the photo I thought to use a potentiometer to adjust the volume, but the one that I have is 50K and it’s just. too much for the buzzer)

I took a case and made two holes in it (one for the wirings and another for the 5v power supply) and I put the Arduino inside it and the breadboard outside.
On Github’s readme, you can find two other ideas I left there if you’re keen to improve this project.

The code

This isn’t the first time that I have made something like this. The first time I used a buzzer, I translated the imperial march of Star Wars notes to frequencies in an Arduino sketch, calculating manually the pauses and adding them line by line. I lost that piece of code and now I coded this song in a cleaner way using cycles and arrays.

Take a look:

And that is all

I hope that if you did or will do something along the lines of this little thing, you’ll link it to me through social networks, but most importantly I wish you a Merry Christmas!

Enjoy 🎅🎄