Project
Automatic Player Piano In progress
This is a project I started the summer after freshman year. It's still incomplete, but it's something I plan to finish before I graduate.
One day my friends and I found a piano on the side of the road, and I really wanted to bring it home and refurbish it. After about two hours of struggling to lift it into my friend's truck, we finally drove it back to my house. I had two phases planned: first, sand and refurbish the wood; second, build robotic mechanisms to automate it so the piano plays like a ghost piano.
Sanding took way longer than I expected, since it was really my first time doing any woodworking. Because of the lack of time, I didn't fully finish over the summer — but I did make decent progress on the robotic side. I built a skeleton of the 88 keys using LEDs, and with that I wrote the basic software behind the logic of sending a MIDI signal to a specific key (represented as an LED). The next steps are to build a proper circuit using solenoids and then a mechanical housing to support the keys.