Buzzer music: Simple melodies with the Pi Pico
Buzz It, Baby!
© Lead Image © writerfantast, 123RF.com
Use the buzzer to have your MCU play small wake-up melodies, signals, or music to accompany LED animations. The sound might not be a feast for the ears, but it does give your projects a great retro feel.
Every PC has at least a small beeper for signal tones. In the case of microcontrollers, you need to retrofit a buzzer to do this, but buzzers are too good for just outputting beeps. They are available for a small amount from the typical marketplaces, and you can choose between two basic types: active and passive. The active relies on a built-in oscillator to generate sound and only require two pins, while you need to feed a PWM signal to the passive. Besides voltage and earth, they require another pin for the signal.
The buzzers themselves look like small black pots with two pins (Figure 1, center and right). For active buzzers, you just need the component itself, but for passive buzzers, it makes sense to use a breakout with the required circuitry (Figure 1, left). There are also breakouts for active buzzers with three pins, but one of them is not assigned in this case. When purchasing, you can use the designation as a guide: Passive buzzers will be known as KY-006 or HW-508, while an active variant often has KY-012 in its name.
Because the parts are inexpensive, it's a good idea to grab a handful of them. A single buzzer is fine for simple tone sequences, but it's more fun if you have several of them so that you can create entire chords instead of just individual tones.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
KDE Linux Alpha Available for Daring Users
It's official, KDE Linux has arrived, but it's not quite ready for prime time.
-
AMD Initiates Graphics Driver Updates for Linux Kernel 6.18
This new AMD update focuses on power management, display handling, and hardware support for Radeon GPUs.
-
AerynOS Alpha Release Available
With a choice of several desktop environments, AerynOS 2025.08 is almost ready to be your next operating system.
-
AUR Repository Still Under DDoS Attack
Arch User Repository continues to be under a DDoS attack that has been going on for more than two weeks.
-
RingReaper Malware Poses Danger to Linux Systems
A new kind of malware exploits modern Linux kernels for I/O operations.
-
Happy Birthday, Linux
On August 25, Linux officially turns 34.
-
VirtualBox 7.2 Has Arrived
With early support for Linux kernel 6.17 and other new additions, VirtualBox 7.2 is a must-update for users.
-
Linux Mint 22.2 Beta Available for Testing
Some interesting new additions and improvements are coming to Linux Mint. Check out the Linux Mint 22.2 Beta to give it a test run.
-
Debian 13.0 Officially Released
After two years of development, the latest iteration of Debian is now available with plenty of under-the-hood improvements.
-
Upcoming Changes for MXLinux
MXLinux 25 has plenty in store to please all types of users.