This LEGO Super Mario Bros. sprite plays polyphonic music

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Maker creates an electronic LEGO Super Mario Bros. Dry Bones sprite with glowing eyes and polyphonic music.

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Who could forget the days of slipping a Super Mario Bros. cartridge into their Nintendo console and the distinct chiptune soundbites that ensued from hitting every power-up? Inspired by the ‘80s pop culture phenomenon, last year Baron von Brunk created mini 3D pixelated versions of the iconic Starman and Super Mushroom boosters entirely from LEGO pieces, and impressively, embedded them with circuitry to emit sound and flash LED lights in unison.

Now several months later, the Maker has returned with another slick project — which he tweeted to us just moments ago. Using similar technology as his previous LEGO Super Mario power-ups, he has designed a new 3D sprite that can actually play polyphonic music. This is made possible through Len Shustek’s Miditones Arduino code, which is capable of converting MIDI files into binary code and then being split amongst multiple AVR timers for three sound channels.

For this particular build, von Brunk chose the Fortress theme from Super Mario Bros. 3. Along with the tunes, the eyes once again blink with a flickering red LED. However, unlike his previous projects, the Dry Bones model employs four AAA batteries along with an ATmega328P, rather than two coin cells and an ATtiny85.

“I wanted to use a standard LED to blink in synch with the music, but alas I wasn’t able to achieve this due to the ATmega’s timers being occupied with the musical score,” the Maker explains.

Intrigued? See it in action below!