Planet Arduino

If you have even a passing familiarity with how to play a piano, you know that there are a bunch of long white keys, with a lesser number of black keys in a nearly-universal arrangement. On the other hand, like the standard and much lesser-known Dvorak keyboard for typing, there are alternatives. One such alternative is the Jankó keyboard, which Ben Bradley decided to reconstruct for the Moog Werkstatt using a capacitive touch sensor setup.

His new instrument, which as of his write-up only had 13 keys connected, was constructed for the 2017 Moog Hackathon at Georgia Tech. It uses an Arduino Mega for control along with four MPR121 capacitive touch breakout boards, and as seen in the video below, can be played quite well after only one day of practice!

You can find more details on his build, including its Arduino code, on the Freeside Atlanta website and check out its feature on Hackaday here.

(Photo: Nathan Burnham)

The Moog Werkstatt-Ø1 is a patchable, 100% little analog synthesizer whose design is based on classic Moog circuits. It was created as an educational tool for teaching electronics assembly and analog circuit design. Recently a series of tutorial projects appeared on Werkstatt website, featuring the use of the Arduino Uno to mod and create effects using  different sensors and components:

We used the Arduino UNO R3 for all mods, and the Moog Werkstatt Arduino Library was written specifically for it. Other micro-controllers with similar bootloaders (Teesnsy, Seeeduino, etc) have not been tested but could work. The Arduino features a USB interface, 6 analog input pins, and 14 digital I/O pins.

The 5 tutorials have also series of videos that demo each mod. For example, they integrated an accelerometer to measure movement in three dimensions:

And they added an arpeggiator/sequencer function:

Check them all >>  And add your own mod!