Embedded Lab

Stian Eikeland’s capacitive touch banana piano is really cool.

Check out the demo here:

This weekend my niece-in-law is staying over, and to maintain my image as the crazy scientist uncle I’ve planned to make a banana piano (and lots of weird ice creams). In clojure there’s a pretty cool programmable audio environment called Overtone. Overtone features a decent sampled piano, and I’m thinking this could be a great basis for a banana-piano.There’s a couple of ways we can make bananas act as tangents, one of them is to use the bananas as capacitive touch sensors. Using a nice little hack it’s possible to do this using regular digital pins on a microcontroller. The hack is (afaik) originally from Mario Becker, Fraunhofer IGD, 2007 (website dead). Check out the article on capacitive sensors over at arduino.cc.