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.
Figure 1: Here you can see a passive buzzer (left) and two raw buzzers (center, right).
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Digital Autonomy
• The Answer Was Already on the Shelf
• Changing the Chip Industry: How Public Investment Has Grown Open Silicon
• United Nations Open Source Portal Goes Live
• EU Open Source Strategy Plays Key Role in Tech Sovereignty Package
• France Says “Au Revoir” to Microsoft
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 for People Initiative Calls for AI Ban in Plasma
A new community of KDE wants the project to adopt a strict no-AI policy for KDE Plasma.
-
KDE Sets Ambitious Goals for 2026 and Beyond
KDE Connect reveals the goals for the Linux desktop darling, with one of those goals long overdue.
-
It’s Time to Test Fedora 45 Beta
Fedora 45 beta has been released with updated Gnome, KDE Plasma, and kernel.
-
Ubuntu Stonking Stingray Gets Even Rustier
Ubuntu 26.10 has completed its migration to the Rust-based coreutils.
-
AI Fixes Linux Bottlenecks Using “Hideous” Code
A Linux developer used AI to fix bottlenecks that caused problems when building the kernel. The resulting AI-generated code needed a lot of work.
-
Advanced Video Coding Still Under Patent
Brazilian patent BRPI0109962B1 has expired, which means that DivX and Xvid are no longer problematic for Linux, but it doesn’t mean that video is all of a sudden fully unleashed.
-
2,000 Vulnerabilities per Linux Release
Thanks to AI bug hunters, the Linux kernel is seeing record numbers of vulnerabilities, and it's overwhelming developers.
-
Linux Exempt from California’s Age Verification Law
So long as Linux is distributed under the GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses, the OS is exempt from being required to verify the age of its users in California.
-
Roll Out the Cake: Linux Turns 35
35 years ago, a Finnish student began a humble project that would forever change the course of technology.
-
China Switching from Windows to Linux
China has ordered several government agencies to drop a Chinese-developed version of Windows 10 in favor of either KylinOS or UOS.