Velocity Sensitive Digital Piano – Cornell University ECE 5760 Advanced Microcontrollers Final Project

The Cornell University ECE 5760 Advanced Microcontroller course is done! As usual there are lots of interesting creations that have full documentation for us to have a look at. There are 10 projects posted (2 of them still need the project details to be added). This time there is a great variety of projects, everything from realtime face tracking to this Velocity Sensitive Digital Piano by Chris McNally and Joe Kerekes. Be sure to have a look at the projects if you are looking for some inspiring ideas.

Thanks to Bruce Land for allowing these projects to be shared with all of us!

"Our project is a velocity sensitive hardware based piano. We simulated two strings per note using a Karplus Strong algorithm written in Verilog, and coupled it with a Casio electric piano keyboard fitted with custom switches to act as a user interface. On an Altera DE2 board we built a hardware Karplus-Strong synthesizer to simulate a piano key with two strings, along with a hardware timer. The timer was used to determine the key push’s velocity, which in turn affected the volume level of the synthesized sound. The keyboard fed into the DE2 using the board’s GPIO ports. "