Piano

August 2022

Personal project

Unlike a lot of other Asian American kids, I never had to learn piano as a kid, and in fact basically never touched a piano my whole life until college--so when I arrived to campus as a freshman, I decided to start dabbling around on the pianos in my dorm or other communal areas on campus. But in order to practice without everyone hearing me mess up, I thought it would be nice to have a small piano (at least two octaves) to practice on my own in my room. Thus, this project to 3d print a piano.

The piano uses thin PLA pieces as keys that can bend elastically when pressed. Underneath are copper tapes that can detect when a key is pressed, and then sends the signal to an arduino input.

After that, the signal is sent from the arduino to a python program, which plays the appropriate sound files. The two main challenges were getting a finite sound file to play continuously for as long as the key was pressed, and getting an arbitrary number of keys to play at the same time to create chords.

Below is a demo of me "playing" the piano. A warning for your ears, I still don't know how to play very well--but at least I know how to 3d print one!