Dash dash dot dot! This project combines a Raspberry Pi mini computer with USB-connected peripheral devices - a simple button and a basic speaker - to create a functioning Morse code keyer that works from switch-on time.

This fun side project combines hardware and software to create a wonderful, tactile educational device that practices several skills at once: listening, concentration, coordination. This device has certainly been a hit with my children! In this article, I’ll describe how I built the project and walk you through some of the key concepts involved.

The objective of this project is to create a program that listens to a continuous stream of sound and identifies when a particular song - the target track - is playing. This is similar to how home assistants such as Amazon’s ‘Alexa’ function, except they seek out a different sound (their name). Ultimately, this project will be used to replay the detected positive sound to a speaker, serving as a doorbell amplifier.

I was curious to see if I could write a music-shuffling program in Java, so that I could listen to tracks stored on an external hard drive. I had digitised an old vinyl collection, most of which can’t be found on YouTube!

The program is simple: it finds all the tracks from a given directory and its subdirectories, and plays them in a random order. If your music is organised into categories or artists, then you can target a particular genre by passing in the appropriate directory as the first argument.