Category: Amelia’s Piano

All I have left to do is nail down the keys, glue the board to the base, and hook up the battery.

It’s so close!

Playing two octaves

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 🙂

For her 2nd birthday, I’m going to build Amelia a digital piano. It will highlight the keys as it plays songs, and then let her play it back by highlighting the next note, and waiting for her to hit it. I’m probably more excited about building it then she will be receiving it, but so it goes at this age 🙂

I’ll be building it using a bunch of fun technologies that I haven’t had a chance to play with yet. The microprocessor will be an Arduino. I’m really excited to play with the Arduino as the breadboard was my favorite part of undergrad EE. If you don’t know much about Arduino, then I’d check out this TED talk from the guy who I think is the founder of the project.

To make the actual piano, I’ll be using a 3D printer. I’ve been scouring the web for open source CAD software, and hopefully (the goal for this week) I’ll have the piano laid out this week. Then, I’m going to have to find a 3D printing company to rent some time and/or order the parts. I’m thinking a baby grand that hides the Arduino, and has 2 octaves worth of keys surrounding middle-C, but we’ll see 🙂

I want to document as I build it so that one day Amelia can see how it was all done, and maybe someone else will pick it up, and build their own. And hopefully you guys will enjoy seeing it go along the way.