Scottychord - cmubuild18/Build18 GitHub Wiki
Scottychord
Battery-powered mini piano. Play a song on a virtual piano and see it performed on the Scottychord real-time.
The goal of our project was to build a physical piano-like instrument that could play a song inputted by a user. In order to play the piano, the user presses keys (on laptop) in order to play notes on a virtual piano UI. The Scottychord then plays the song back with the same melody and rhythm that was played. The instrument is built with lyre strings hit by small wooden hammers. These hammers are glued to motors which spin and hit the strings to make music. Each motor is connected to a relay, and each relay is connected to a single 9V battery source. The relay trigger is connected to an Arduino MEGA�s digital output pins. The piano interface is built using pygame and serial. It sends the song to the Arduino MEGA as a string. MEGA receives the string via USB and runs code that parses the string and plays the song.
We ended up changing much of our implementation. Previously, we designed and 3D-printed a mechanism to pluck the lyre strings, taking inspiration from guitar picking and a harpsichord (the precursor to the modern piano). However, we found out that the mechanism was too heavy and required too much precision for the motors. We pivoted to a wooden hammer mechanism to directly hit the strings to produce sound. The relays ended up being used to control which keys are played and when. The strings were strung across the top of the instrument similar to a lyre. We used hot glue to hold the wood together and a small breadboard to share the battery source.
Team Members
| Team Member | Photo |
|---|---|
| Andrew Gao | |
| Hannah Noh |
Photos
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1aGssRyFdwAR6Zdu2QjV-_sFyQu19YXKS?usp=sharing