Giancarlo Todone writes to tell us about his homebrew solution for converting an old keyboard to MIDI. The project is especially nice because he went beyond the standard on/off key detection, and added full velocity sensitivity for the keys. This means that the keyboard can detect how fast a key is pressed, allowing the keyboard to be played more expressively. Full schematics and source code are available on his website, however the writeup is in Italian.
Posted by Matt Mets |
Sep 10, 2009 10:15 AM
Electronics, Music, Something I want to learn to do... |
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I may have misunderstood this, but it looks like he's using a column/row approach when reading the keys. That will cause key ghosting, where holding more than one key at the same time causes extra notes to be added into the chord. I think that for polyphonic music (even with just two voices), a fully connected keyboard is the only possible solution.
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Hi, and thanks for your comment. Yes, at first (ignoring the second switch for each key allowing for dynamic detection) you can consider keys arranged as an 8x8 matrix, but -as you can see in video- no problem with multiple presses because of negative logic and of the diodes (one for each switch) stopping inverse current (you can find arrangement in schematics). The same goal could be achieved with tri state buffers, but the chosen solution is cheaper. Good luck finding a cheap microcontroller with more than 128 pins for direct I/O!
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I just looked at the schematics, and think it's a really neat solution. Thanks for responding; I learnt something!
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