Arduino Controlled Chime Machine (RIT - MECE 104)

This was a project I worked in MECE 104 - Engineering Design Tools. In this project groups of 4 built chime machines with at least 6 notes to play a song of their choice. I was the programmer for my group and got a good introduction to Arduino programming and motor control.

Final chime machine

We chose to play Take Me Home, Country Roads by John Denver because it only required 6 notes and the beat wasn't super fast. At the end of the project, all 32 groups voted on the best chime machines. Our machine was one of the 6 selected to play at the Imagine RIT event in the fall. 

We designed our chime machine to require minimal motors, so the programming wasn't too difficult. 4 of the chimes were struck by solenoids, the other 2 were struck by motors. I learned a lot about general Arduino programming and using the Arduino IDE. I also learned how to write functions and wrote some code for a PID loop for the motors, but ended up giving them timed delays instead. The code is available here. 

Video of chime machine: https://youtu.be/HXMbsqfGB38