skiffle

A sound board where all sounds used in PhET sims can be tried out.

Prerequisites

Skiffle scans sound files from a totality monorepo checkout. It does not live inside the monorepo — it is an external tool cloned as a sibling of totality.

Expected directory layout:

parent/
  totality/       # the PhET monorepo
  skiffle/        # this repo (sibling, not inside totality)

If your layout differs, set the TOTALITY_PATH environment variable to point to your totality checkout.

Building

To regenerate the soundboard HTML:

npm run build

To override the default totality location:

TOTALITY_PATH=/path/to/totality npm run build

This scans all repos in totality for sounds/ directories and generates html/sound-board.html.

Usage

The generated sound-board.html references sound files via relative paths into the totality checkout. It must be served over HTTP (not opened as a file:// URL) because the Web Audio API uses fetch() to load sounds.

For example, serve from the common parent directory of skiffle and totality:

cd parent/ && npx http-server -p 8080

Then open http://localhost:8080/skiffle/html/sound-board.html.

Alternatively, if totality's chipper dev-server is running, any HTTP server that can reach both skiffle and totality from the same origin will work.

Automation

This project is automatically rebuilt every night via daily-grunt-work.sh in the totality monorepo. The generated HTML is committed and pushed to GitHub.