Accordion Mega story
I like to play accordion & have a dog. People say dogs are singing with squeezeboxes and some people find it funny. Not for me. I know that my pet hears note harmonics much better then me & suffers from high pitches very much. So, no real practice at home just because of humanity. That sucks. I like to play accordion. Programmers see cycle here. Let's get out of it.
THIS IS IT.
It plays to headphones, produces MIDI output, etc. etc.
It costs $6,699.00 on e-bay (buy now offer) as of 17 of November 2010.
In US I can buy
Peugeot Partner
for the same price.
In Ukraine where i live both items cost a half higher.
For that money i'll get beautiful device to practice at home and no service centers available within 400Km radius. Weird.
Another cycle, getting out of it just below.
Let's build MIDI accordion.
What do we require:
- Old accordion to be reborn
- scan 41 keys of right hand
- scan 120 buttons of left hand
- measure pressure inside box
- send all of that via MIDI message to much smarter device i'm writing this text on.
Googling a bit, microcontrollers, robots, hurray 2,3,5 are done by MIDI Chromatic Button Accordion (CBA) and costs 75 euro. Nice try, Tom, however for a pre-programmed device, price is too high. Soldering 120 reed switches for the left hand & 41 for the right will give me much soldering experience and quite dumb device. It will produce notes without a feel, being closed for further development. No, thanks. But thanks for informative site, really!
Another hobbyst, Mike Szczys with impressive youtube video. It works, huh? No source code. You will not have a chance even to make a copy of that toy. Thanks anyway, Mike, you proved we can do it.
So, arduino. As of 2010 this project looks slightly outdated, but, who cares. It has descent hardware (comparing with Sinclair 48K i had long time ago), some IDE, lots of libraries and ready-made projects.
Lets try to solve our requirements one by one.
- you have one if read this article up to here. Solved.
- keyboard
it have to be
- fast
- cheap
- chorded (allow pressing of any button combination)
- fit inside old accordion.
candidates are:
- matrix keyboard: possible (with diodes)
- 1-wire keyboard: no, no chording
- PC keyboard chip: cheap, no chording
- hall sensors: cheap? no way
- optointerruptors: yes, read below
notes: