Teaching Keyboard

Introduction:

As part of an undergraduate course, a team of four including myself was tasked with making a device utilizing arduino, and the circuit basics we had learned that semester. We had the spark of inspiration to incorporate something musical into our design and came up with the multifunctional keyboard.

Design and Features:

The keyboard consisted of seven input keys, and a potentiometer knob featured on the right side of the pcb as inputs. Its outputs consisted of the seven different colored LED's, the display pointer(music note), and a female aux port on the left side of the prototype. It was controlled by an arduino uno, and powered by the shown battery pack.

Depending on the song chosen using the display pointer, the LED's would guide the user through the song lighting up when the user needed to play a note which prompted note and duration. Additionally, the user had the option to record their own song and have the same prompting when playing it back.

The instrument had an accessory MATLAB program where a user could enter the notes and octave of new songs resulting in a script. This script could be entered into a specific location of the arduino's firmware allowing for new songs to be uploaded quickly.

Personal Contributions:

My personal contributions to the project included contributing to the design of the electrical circuit. Following the design, I prototyped and then soldered the final version onto the breadboard as shown.

I also wrote the firmware for the Arduino Uno, utilizing open source libraries for the control of the servo motor, and writing custom functions for the keys and notes that were called by the accessory MATLAB program as described.