Turning Toy Pianos Into MIDI Keyboards

Building a MIDI device is always a great microcontroller project, and nearly everyone has an old toy keyboard lying around in the back of a closet or in the basement. [JenShen] decided to take one of these toy keyboards and build a MIDI keyboard.

The keyboard [JenShen] used was a simple Casio keyboard with built-in voices. After tearing out the guts of the keyboard, the only thing that remained is the row of push buttons underneath the keys. These buttons were laid out in a row/column matrix, so [JenShen] needed to decode this matrix before sending the result to an Arduino for processing.

A 74HN595 shift register was used to read the 8 rows of buttons underneath the keys, while the rows were tied to different input pins on the ‘duino. This allowed [JenShen] to scan the keyboard matrix with an Arduino and generate MIDI notes and send them to other synths.

In the video after the break, you can check out [JenShen]’s circuit and code that allowed him to turn a toy keyboard into a proper 32-note MIDI keyboard. It’s not velocity sensitive, but he says he’ll show everyone how to accomplish that in a future post.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEqzr5NUdQo&w=470]

8 thoughts on “Turning Toy Pianos Into MIDI Keyboards

    1. Hi John, I’ve left it default 16Mhz clock. so each of 8 columns scanned with about 2Mhz clock. I have not played much with this but I believe clock speed can be reduced to save some power. Response was not measured but it is by feel is instantaneous.

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