Hey all!
As we mentioned in our last post, we selected the piano player as our real, honest to goodness, totally awesome, Great Global Hackerspace Challenge project.
Here's the official description:
The piano player is a handheld musical microcontroller. At it's simplest, it's a small box you drag across an arrangment of black magnets on a board, generating music.
We originally envisioned this as a tool to introduce musical composition and music playing at an earlier age, in a cheap and easy manner. From talk with local teachers we've also found that it can be used in a variety of other lesson plans involving pattern matching, spatial reasoning, and linguistic skills like alliteration and rhythm.
The piano player can be built for about $25. The interface to create music is literally a metal board and magnets--the sort of thing you can easily hand out to kids without worrying about any damage as you might with traditional instruments. A teacher only needs a few of the actual players to scale to a class of 30 or more, and can easily put a cheap board in the hands every student.
Since the last post, Jeff Crews has created a fine enclosure, and Peter Reintjes and Alan Dipert have really gotten the software in excellent shape.
Rather than me blabbering on for another page, we thought it would be best to show you all a video.
In addition, Ashley McClelland has put together a great site for the piano player, with lesson plans, schematics, and other information.
The code running the Piano player is available on github.