Greetings!
In today's project, we will look at how to build an Audio Visualizer (like a graphic equalizer display), that will put on a light show for you in time to your music, using an RGB Matrix Shield, a Spectrum Analyzer Shield and an Arduino Uno. We will, of course, put it in a nice ProtoStax for Arduino enclosure so that you can have a finished project that you can proudly display by your music system to have a nice light show of your music!
SparkFun's Spectrum Shield has two MSGEQ7 graphic equalizer display filters, so it can analyze both channels of your stereo input and give representations of amplitude of different frequency bands in the spectrum. We read this information using an Arduino, and then use Adafruit's NeoPixel Shield for Arduino, that has 40 RGB NeoPixels arranged in an 8 x 5 format, to display the frequency band/amplitude information using a variety of color schemes. The end result is an addictive color display that dances to your music! I could watch that for hours! 😊
With ProtoStax for Arduino, not only does it fit any of a whole range of Arduino boards (from Uno/Leanardo to Mega/Due), but there was enough room to fit not one, but two Shield inside (with some minor adjustments) - giving you protection for your entire project and not just your Arduino, and giving you a finished-looking project that you can actually display and use!
Ok, let's dive right in! You can find the tutorial with complete instructions and link to the GitHub repository for the code at
https://www.hackster.io/sridhar-rajagopal/rgb-matrix-audio-visualizer-with-arduino-845062
Here is a video showing the ProtoStax Audio Visualizer in action, showing 3 different colors schemes - greens to reds, blue to pink, rotating colors from the color wheel.
Happy Making!
Sridhar (and the ProtoStax Team! 😊)