Project Introduction

One sentence “sound bite” that describes our project.

“Pi-Looper”, an innovative and affordable loop station empowers musicians to record and create their musical journey.

A summary of what we did and why.

• A loop station is a music device used by musicians for recording, looping, and playing back audio snippets in real-time during performance. It allows musicians to capture and reproduce short musical segments, often played on instruments or vocals, and then layer these recordings on top of each other to build complex arrangements.
• We developed a loop station called “Pi-Looper” using Raspberry Pi Pico that empowers musicians to effortlessly layer, record, and save instrument tracks. Unlike traditional loop stations, “Pi-Looper” incorporates FRAM to enable users to save and retrieve tracks through serial communication, providing a new level of flexibility and persistence in music creations. We designed and tested an amplifier circuit to amplify instrument signal, in our case a guitar signal, to an optimal input range for the pico’s ADC. We then implemented loop station logic by designing a finite state machine (FSM) based on button inputs for record, playback, stop, and clear functionalities.