Building a velocity sensitive keyboard

keys

Cheap toy pianos don't usually have MIDI, and getting a velocity-sensitive keyboard from something out of the toy aisle at Walmart is nearly out of the question. If you're willing to tear one of these toy pianos apart and build your own control electronics, though, the sky is the limit, as [JenShen] shows us with his home built velocity sensitive keyboard. Usually, velocity-sensitive … [Read more...]

Type4me is a hardware clipboard for your digital copy and paste needs

type4me-hardware-clipboard

It doesn't happen often, but every now and again we find ourselves wanting for a more extensible cut and paste experience. Most notably we've searched for something that makes is very easy to keep multiple things in the clipboard and paste them as needed. Although we've tried several software offerings nothing really made it up to grade, but this hardware clipboard looks very promising. [Luca … [Read more...]

Kitchen scale key transplant

kitchen-scale-key-transplant

[Markus] is quite happy with his kitchen scale. It's one of the tools he uses most frequently when cooking. But recently the button has begun to give him problems. He figures the years of spilling a little bit of this and that has mucked up the contacts. His solution was to bypass the button using a Cherry MX switch. Really any replacement should do since the switch merely completes an … [Read more...]

Put that headphone jack anywhere you want it

yamaha-keyboard-headphone-jack-hack

Check out this brand new Yamaha keyboard. The fact that we're seeing the guts means that [Todd Harrison] can kiss his warranty goodbye. But by now you should know that he doesn't look to others when something goes wrong with his electronics. This time around he's not repairing anything. He didn't like having to plug in headphones on the rear of the keyboard. He cracked it open and relocated the … [Read more...]

USB NeXT Keyboard

USB NeXT Keyboard

[Ladyada] and [pt] had an old keyboard from NeXT, but since it used a custom protocol it wasn't usable with modern hardware. So they built a custom device to convert the NeXT protocol to USB. The device uses a Arduino Micro to read data from the keyboard and communicate as a HID device over USB. It connects to the keyboard using the original mini-DIN connector, and is housed in the classic … [Read more...]

Turning toy pianos into MIDI keyboards

MIDI

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 … [Read more...]

Typing with a MIDI drum set

drums

[Autuin] picked up the drums at the age of 18, but by his own admission he's no [Bonzo], [Buddy Rich] or [Ringo]. Practicing always seems to fall off the end of his to-do list, and there really is only one way to Carnegie Hall. One thing [Autuin] is really fast at is typing, so he figured he could improve his drumming skills by banging a few paragraphs out. The core of the build is a Yamaha … [Read more...]