my recent reads..

LEAP#226 Music Box Kit


This is a pretty common kit available from multiple sources, although it appears to have been originally produced by icstation. The heart of the kit is a a potted chip, one of many similar boards primarily produced as the sound effects generators used in toys. the kit adds supporting circuitry on a PCB to drive a piezo speaker and decode 4 switch inputs to select one of 16 effects. As demonstrated here, it is possible to drive the board with a microcontroller. As always, all notes, schematics and code are in the Little Electronics & Arduino Projects repo on GitHub hero_image

Does this generate good sound effects? No! Twee at best, horribly poor immitation at worst. But if you want to sound like a cheap toy, this may be exactly what you need;-)