Wireless MIDI Floor Piano!

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[Jianan Li] just finished documenting one of his most recent projects, a wireless MIDI floor piano that he and a small group made for Duke University’s Hackathon!

He was inspired to do this project after reading our recent coverage on a DIY Pressure Plate. Having only 24 hours to compete in the Hackathon, they had to choose something that was fairly easy to build out of cheap materials, and quick to assemble. This was just the ticket.

The piano features 25 of the aluminum foil pressure plates, whose state are read by the Arduino Mega. This is then transmitted by an XBee radio to an Arduino Uno, which acts as the receiver for the laptop that processes the signals. They even added a remote control using an ATtiny85 to allow for octave and instrument changes — it also uses an XBee to communicate back to the Uno. For a 24 hour build, the quality is quite impressive, and it doesn’t sound half bad either — Take a listen after the break!

You might remember [Jianan Li] from one of his other projects we featured a few months ago — his beautifully wired Breadboard Tetris game.

2 thoughts on “Wireless MIDI Floor Piano!

  1. Some people used to combine juggling with floor pianos – or made it seem like they were. I remember one on the Statler Brothers live show where the production crew accidentally revealed the trick.

    They went to a view from stage right for a couple of seconds and there the guy was just offstage, playing a keyboard in synch with the juggler.

    I bet the guy was pissed that they blew his act.

    Know of any people doing this act that are actually directly playing a keyboard with juggling balls?

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