Random Preonic sounds

I kind of warned you about making sounds with the Preonic keyboard, because 80s beeps will never go out of fashion, and these clicky switches aren’t noisier enough anyway. Check the previous post if you need to, this is a follow up.

Playing sounds is very simple with QMK, thanks to the cute PLAY_SONG macro, to make the board play very geeky boops.

Since we started from the default keymap and config for the v3 preonic, we already have audio enabled on the board. There’s nothing else to configure: as far as I know we can already beep to our heart’s content.

In QMK, we have a C macro SONG(list of notes). It gives us back an array, that we can feed to PLAY_SONG to actually play sounds. Of course these are C macros, so we can’t really inline things like this: PLAY_SONG(SONG(TADAAA)). NOPE!

No big deal. We’ll use an intermediate variable to store the “song”, and feed that to PLAY_SONG. For our purpose, let’s reuse a song from song_list.h (this file). Writing your own stuff is fun, but it’ll keep this post short.

I’ll use the CAPS_LOCK_ON_SOUND (and off) sounds, which seem half-appropriate.

Let’s declare these two songs in keymap.c:

#ifdef AUDIO_ENABLE
static float caps_word_on_song[][2] = SONG(CAPS_LOCK_ON_SOUND);
static float caps_word_off_song[][2] = SONG(CAPS_LOCK_OFF_SOUND);
#endif

Now, we could update the previous post’s tap-dance callback to play sounds, but the caps-word feature is more ergonomic than that. Just use the caps_word_set_user callback. It gets a “bool” to indicate the current state. Again, in keymap.c:

#ifdef AUDIO_ENABLE
void caps_word_set_user(bool active) {
	if (active) {
		PLAY_SONG(caps_word_on_song);
	} else {
		PLAY_SONG(caps_word_off_song);
	}
}
#endif

The whole #ifdef wrapping isn’t essential here, but the function only matters when audio is enabled in my case. YMMV.

That’s it. See, THAT WAS NOT THAT HARD. Sorry, just testing. :)