Saturday, March 14, 2015

16-channel relay box controlled by a Raspberry Pi

It's not quite finished yet, but it's in a usable state. This isn't full instructions, but hopefully enough to get you started if you're interested. Please comment below if you'd like more information.

Some of the Parts:
8-Channel 5V Relay Board (two of these)
Raspberry Pi, SD card, associated cables
female to female jumper wire for connecting Raspberry Pi GPIO pins to relay board pins
thick wire for connecting relays to outlets
nine outlets
CNC or laser-cut front plate from this drawing
LightShow Pi software (haven't tried this yet)




An example Python script to flash through the relays one at a time:


import time
delayTime = 0.25
import RPi.GPIO as GPIO
GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BCM)
pins = [2, 3, 4, 17, 27, 22, 10, 9, 14, 15, 18, 23, 24, 25, 8, 7]

for pin in pins:
    GPIO.setup(pin, GPIO.OUT) 
    GPIO.output(pin, GPIO.HIGH)
    time.sleep(delayTime)
    GPIO.output(pin, GPIO.LOW)
    time.sleep(delayTime)
GPIO.cleanup

Thursday, March 12, 2015

Digital Citizenship Resources

Cross-posted from our previous blog site.

Here are some digital citizenship resources that are available for staff use:

One of our favorite resources is Common Sense Media. It includes resources sorted by grade or by theme. They have videos and downloadable (PDF) lessons. There are also eight iBooks for use on iPads or other Apple devices.

Media Smarts is another good site for digital citizenship classroom resources and lesson plans. There are Alberta-specific resources for all grades, and a set of videos and lesson plans related to media literacy.

As well, check out the NHL's Future Goals Program.

See also DigitalCitizenship.net and the Alberta Education Digital Citizenship Policy Development Guide.


Of course the main thing is to have these discussions with staff and students.

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Elementary Music and Notes in Sonic Pi

In this activity we are going to play some notes with Sonic Pi.

The song "Johnny Works With One Hammer" is a fairly simple tune, listen to someone singing it:



Did you hear how the sound goes higher and lower? Sonic Pi will play higher sounds when you tell it to play higher numbers, and lower sounds with lower numbers. Try pasting this into Sonic Pi and pushing play to see how it sounds:

# Johnny part one
use_bpm 200
play_pattern [53, 53, 53, 57, 60, 53, 53]

Each of those numbers is a different sound, what we would call a different note. You heard higher numbers as higher sounds, which are higher notes. The use_bpm part is just telling Sonic Pi how fast to play.
But let's get back to our song. We've seen that we can play high and low sounds by telling Sonic Pi to play different numbers.

The number pattern for the first part of "Johnny Works With One Hammer" would be:
53 53 53 57 60 53 53
55 60 60 57 53 53

I've done the first line of the song, try pasting it into Sonic Pi and then completing the second line of numbers.

# Johnny part one
use_bpm 200
play_pattern [53, 53, 53, 57, 60, 53, 53]
play_pattern []

Did that sound like the song we are trying to play? It was close, but some of the notes are supposed to be longer than others. So instead of play_pattern we can use play_pattern_timed, like this:

# Johnny part one and two, with timing
play_pattern_timed [53, 53, 53, 57, 60, 53, 53], [0.25, 0.25, 0.25, 0.25, 0.5, 0.25, 0.25]
play_pattern_timed [55, 60, 60, 57, 53, 53], [0.5, 0.25, 0.25, 0.5, 0.25, 0.25]

The second list of numbers on each line is the amount of time that Sonic Pi will play the note for. Notice that the note 60 will be played for a longer time (0. 5 seconds). In musical notation we say that the shorter notes are "quarter notes" because they take up a quarter of a bar. The longer notes here are half notes. See what the notes would look like for this part of the song.


A quarter note is sort of a filled-in circle, a half note looks kind of hollow. Now let's try to make our program easier for humans to read by storing the note patterns and timing patterns before we actually play them:

# Johnny part one and two, with timing
play_pattern_timed [53, 53, 53, 57, 60, 53, 53], [0.25, 0.25, 0.25, 0.25, 0.5, 0.25, 0.25]
play_pattern_timed [55, 60, 60, 57, 53, 53], [0.5, 0.25, 0.25, 0.5, 0.25, 0.25]

That's starting to look complicated, but hopefully you can see how it can be broken down into parts. There are four "arrays" there, which are basically lists of numbers. The first one is called notes1 and it contains the notes for the first line of the song. The array called timings1 is a list of how long to play each of those notes. Then we just say play_pattern_timed notes1, timings1 when we want to have Sonic Pi play that list of notes with those timings. Let's try it including variables as well. Will this play the same song?

# Johnny with variables and arrays
quarter = 0.25
half = 0.5
notes1 = [53, 53, 53, 57, 60, 53, 53]
timings1 = [0.25, 0.25, 0.25, 0.25, 0.5, 0.25, 0.25]
notes2 = [55, 60, 60, 57, 53, 53]
timings2 = [0.5, 0.25, 0.25, 0.5, 0.25, 0.25]
play_pattern_timed notes1, timings1
play_pattern_timed notes2, timings2

In this example, we said the time for the shorter notes (quarter notes) should be a quarter of a second (0.25) and the time for a longer note (half note) should be half of a second (0.5). We could also have said:

quarter = 1.0/4
half = 1.0/2

or even:

quarter = 1.0/4
half = quarter/2

In case you're curious, the reason it is 1.0/4 instead of 1/4 is that we need to tell Sonic Pi that we want the numbers to be type float instead of integer. If we said1/4 it would equal 0. Don't worry about this yet though.

Hopefully you are starting to see that there can be a lot of math in music. So far we have done the first half of the song "Johnny Works With One Hammer". If I show you the musical notation version of the whole song, do you think you could translate it into something that Sonic Pi could play? It's a little bit like figuring out a code, you need to figure out what numbers mean the same thing as the notes in the musical notation.



You can also try out different instruments by putting a line like one of these at the top of your code:
use_synth :pretty_bell
use_synth :fm

So now you can make music with Sonic Pi. Try some other songs, and tell your friends.