PianoPi

PianoPi is a Raspberry Pi 5 MIDI player for a solenoid-driven piano/keyboard rig. It plays MIDI files through physical solenoids, mirrors notes to an LED strip, can play speaker audio through FluidSynth, and includes a Tkinter control UI plus a local web control page.

Features

• Tkinter touchscreen-friendly MIDI player
• Physical solenoid playback through PCA9685 boards
• Sustain pedal control through MIDI CC64
• LED strip note mirroring and idle effects
• FluidSynth speaker playback
• Instrument/track mixer
• Keyboard recording support when real_piano is false
• Local web control page on port 8000 by default
• CSV play history log

Hardware this was built for

• Raspberry Pi 5, 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS
• PCA9685 PWM boards for solenoids
• pi5neo LED strip control
• FluidSynth with a General MIDI soundfont
• Optional USB MIDI keyboard for keyboard test mode

Install system packages

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y python3-pip python3-tk fluidsynth fluid-soundfont-gm alsa-utils git

For the local web UI and visualizer, you may also want Chromium installed:

sudo apt install -y chromium-browser

Install Python dependencies

python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

On the Pi with hardware attached:

python3 -m pip install -r requirements-pi.txt

Configure

Copy the example config:

cp player_config.example.json player_config.json

Edit player_config.json:

{
  "midi_dir": "/home/pi5/Desktop/midiMusicFiles",
  "sound_font": "/usr/share/sounds/sf2/FluidR3_GM.sf2",
  "real_piano": false,
  "touchscreen_osk_auto_show": true,
  "web_host": "0.0.0.0",
  "web_port": 8000
}

real_piano controls which hardware mode/profile is used:

• false: keyboard test rig mode, with recording buttons visible
• true: real acoustic piano mode

You can also override a few settings with environment variables:

PIANOPI_MIDI_DIR=/path/to/midi PIANOPI_WEB_HOST=127.0.0.1 python3 PianoPi.py

Run

python3 PianoPi.py

Web control page

By default the web server binds to:

0.0.0.0:8000

That means it listens on all network interfaces so another device on the same trusted local network can open:

http://:8000/