A brand-new issue of Raspberry Pi Official Magazine is out today! One of our favourite projects featured therein is this one, in which Phil King teaches us how to play drum samples at the press of a button with Raspberry Pi Pico.

While the first ever drum machine is considered to be the Rhythmicon, developed by Leon Theremin (yes, he invented that instrument too) in the early 1930s, digital drum machines came to the fore in the 1980s with the likes of the Linn LM-1. The latter cost the equivalent of over $19,000 today, and yet we can now create a DIY drum machine using a $5 Raspberry Pi Pico.

Inspired by Arnov Sharma’s project on Hackster, your author decided to try to create a Pico-powered drum machine using a DF Mini Player to play the drum samples. While Arnov’s version uses a custom PCB for the buttons, we decided to keep it simple with a breadboard-based design — the downside being the spaghetti of jumper wires needed to connect everything up. Still, the principle is the same: you press different push buttons to trigger different drum samples on the DF Mini Player, outputting the audio to a mini speaker.

...read more at raspberrypi.com