Wednesday, October 11, 2017

MIDI fruit piano

My daughters and I saw a Makey-Makey banana piano at a local fair, and they thought it was cool. So I made an Arduino(clone) fruit piano, using capacitive sensing, and a Python program on a computer that plays polyphonic music. It's super-simple, as it uses the ADCTouch library which doesn't need any electronic components besides the Arduino(clone), and it's better than the banana piano as it doesn't require the user to be grounded.

While tweaking the project, I learned that MIDI format is really simple, so now the fruit-piano sends notes to the computer via MIDI-over-serial-over-USB, and so one can presumably use the fruit-piano as a keyboard for various kinds of desktop music software.

Instructions are here. Code is here.

If you look at the picture carefully, you'll see that I cheated. We didn't have the eight oranges for the C major scale that my eldest daughter thought we should have, so two of the keys are soda cans.


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