The Raspberry Pi can play the Pi-ano
London, UK (PRWEB UK) 7 September 2013 -- Governor Technology Ltd. has launched a Raspberry Pi powered robot that plays tunes on a set of musical chimes in its London office. The robot has pride of place in a glass case in the company’s reception area, and anyone with a web browser can send in tunes for the robot to play and watch the results via a live streaming video link. Governor Technology has christened the robot the Raspberry Pi-ano.
The project started as an internal ‘hack’ day with the technical team experimenting with the Raspberry Pi for a bit of fun. The first efforts to create a working robot were held together with bits of sticky tape and cardboard, but as the project developed the team’s ambitions grew and they progressed to building a proper rig for the robot, albeit one made out of wood stuck together with a glue gun.
The Raspberry Pi was programmed to receive tunes in a simple text format and play them back on a set of chimes - using solenoids controlled by the GPIO outputs of the Pi to strike the notes. The team then hooked up the Raspberry Pi to a web page that combines a form to submit tunes with a live streaming video of the robot captured using a Microsoft LifeCam and streamed via ustream.tv.
The Raspberry Pi-ano has been a big hit, with people connecting from all over the world to send in tunes. The company’s favourite so far has been an attempt to play the Dr Who theme tune using only eight diatonic notes. It was surprisingly recognisable and definitely a step up from scales in C major and ‘row, row, row your boat’!
You can visit the Raspberry Piano website at http://raspberrypiano.governor.co.uk.
You can read more about how we built it on our blog:
http://www.governor.co.uk/news-plus-views/2013/august/how-we-built-the-raspberry-pi-ano/
http://www.governor.co.uk/news-plus-views/2013/august/the-raspberry-pi-ano-version-2/
John Mannix, Governor Technology Ltd, http://www.governor.co.uk, +44 2075932210, [email protected]
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