Buzz Buzz - My Sonic Spanner

My love for Doctor Who is known among

my close friends. So recently when looking for something to do with my BBC Microbit, I came across a Doctor Who Challenge on the BBC website. It was a great challenge aimed at young people, but great fun for the young at heart! 

One part of the challenge is to build a sonic device, and it can be ANYTHING! Which leaves a massive margin for creativity, but being the engineer I wanted mine to also be functional, and opted for the trusty adjustable spanner (I never use adjustables unless I really have to, so it was just laying around). 

I got designing, and using a bit of cardboard left over from some packaging I made somewhere to be able to attach the bits and pieces of the sonic spanner, to the actual spanner, which I did using bluetack (for every single bit). 

For the sonic spanner, you need a battery pack, (unless you want to be tethered to a computer - not a good idea!) a buzzer and a spanner. 

My buzzer is a piezo buzzer and I did have a right old time finding out that I couldn't control it digitally, and finding out that an analogue output was only as difficult as changing "write_digital" to "write_analog". I felt like an idiot for a bit...

One of the requirements for your sonic device (as well as buzzing) is to show a picture of the TARDIS on the LEDs on the Microbit. This took a little bit of designing, mine is a simple outline of a TARDIS, that I drew by lighting up individual LEDs and defining them as an image and naming it TARDIS. But I am sure if the mood took you, you could create any image you wanted. 

As there isn't really any guidance on how to get the sonic spanner working, it really is left to you as to what language to use and how you go about doing it. If you know about the Microbit, you will know that there is a few different languages you can use, some are harder than others and require a different way of thinking. I prefer to programme in Micropython. I've included a picture of my code at the end of this post, I hope it is useful to anyone who needs it.

The end product I made I got very very excited about. After having struggled to figure out what to do with my buzzer, (and finding out the answer was simple!) I felt quite proud of it. Now to go buzz at some cupboards..!