It’s been a long time with no progress on the piano. The reason is simple really. I’ve been doing a bunch of research, ordering a bunch of parts, and everything is finally ready to go.
And so the last few nights have been all about soldering, programming, editing, searching, and finally uploading. It all started with a PCB board, and a bunch of parts.
This is probably the first time I’ve done any soldering since the Golden Solder project I did in ECE200. Now those were the good old days. And yet, as I was working through each component, and getting it on the board, it felt like I really knew what I was doing. I didn’t, but at least the ego is still in tact. Resistor bands were read, and placed appropriately. Chips were put in based on the etching on the board. And the wiring I copied from the directions. But in the end, everything looked exactly as it was supposed to, and I was quite confident that it was going to work when I tried it.
Then, on to finding the notes!
Turns out that there’s a fantastic project out of the University of Iowa that has sound files of notes on an instrument. So I hopped on over there, grabbed the files for the piano, and got to editing.
It was a bit frustrating because there is about 3 seconds of track, but only 0.75 seconds (on average) of a note being played. Audacity came to the rescue! I edited up the files, saved them as WAV, and uploaded them to the SD card reader. I was ready to rock and roll.
Last step was getting the library installed, and the music playing. As for that, I’ll let this video do the talking…
Up next is getting it to work with 11 buttons, and having the Arduino component of things finished. And then… 3D printing 🙂