We're more than familiar with the Raspberry Pi's and Raspberry Pi Pico's potential in the music industry and definitely daydream about starting our own Pi-powered band. It's projects like this one from Arnov Sharma that perpetually reignite that fantasy by showing off the cool potential of even the smallest Raspberry Pi—the Raspberry Pi Pico. Using our favorite microcontroller, he's put together a Pico-powered sequencer.
According to Sharma, this project was inspired by the Pocket Operator Synth Sequencers from Teenage Engineering. These are small, as the name suggests, pocket-sized sequencers that make it super easy to conjure up music anywhere you like using their integrated suite of tools.
This custom Raspberry Pi Pico iteration is made up of 25 buttons arranged in a matrix that are operated using the GPIO on the Pico. It has a speaker for audio output and relies on an audio amplification module to process the sound. The end result is a comparable sequencer with the added bonus of building something for yourself from the ground up.
The main board controlling everything is the latest Raspberry Pi Pico 2. It connects to a custom PCB that has room for all of the buttons laid out in a 5 x 5 grid pattern. The audio amplification module chosen was a PAM8403 which enables the Pico to output music through a connected speaker.
The source code for the project has been made available over at Hackster for anyone to explore. In it, we get a good look at some of the tools Sharma programmed into this particular sequencer which includes the ability to record audio sequences, add delays and even generate tones off the Pico.
To get a closer look at this cool Raspberry Pi Pico project, head over to the official project page shared to Hackster and be sure to follow Arnov Sharma for more cool Raspberry Pi creations.
