Physical computing – audio tutorial 3

VU meter effect with peak hold and decay

You’ll learn how to make your products responsive to music, speech or noise with RGB LEDs and FastLED. Instead of driving LEDs, you could of course also drive vibration motors, servos or pneumatic actuators. After all, audio, once processed, is just data.

While the electronic circuit is usually very straightforward, the “magic” in physical computing projects happens always in the code. So, please see the GitHub link to the BOM, the schematic, and extensively commented code that you can easily adapt and recycle in your own projects. Often, there’s a useful code concept or code snippet that you can use for an entirely different design, because it’s a fundamental principle.

If you want to learn about good soldering, this seven minute vintage video is still the best of them all.