Making of Piano Stairs

Instructables have come out with another musical product which is not only communicative but also convenient to carry and the musical installation can be applied to any stairwell. The project involves a light-based “tripwire” for each stair, where the light sources are on one side of the stair and the photoresistors on the other. The basic concept is that Arduino read from the sensors and passes the values to the Raspberry Pi, which in turn generates the sounds.

 

 

To make a piano stair, you will need photoresistors, resistors, 1000 ohms light sources, standard speaker set, w/ audio cable, breadboard, Wire, Soldering iron, Arduino Uno and a Raspberry Pi. Once the equipment are arranged, read a light sensor from the Arduino. Get the basic light sensor circuit set up by using a breadboard and an Arduino to understand how the basic light sensing works.

 

The photoresistor circuits are soldered at per step of the staircase along with sensor per step and all of them are connected at the bottom of the stairs. The photoresistors are kept stable with the help of card backing and the legs of the sensor are stuck through electrical tape.

 

The ground wire are soldered and everything is connected to the Arduino with a really long wire that is stripped in appropriate places. Each short ground wire is soldered to the long ground wire and is plugged into Arduino’s ground pin. The power output pin of Arduino (5V) is connected to a power row of breadboard via a wire.

 

The staircase is set up by masking tape, twist ties and flashlights’ to each piece of cardboard to one stair. Further the flashlight beam must be adjusted in a manner that falls directly on the photoresistor. Finally, the Arduino code is uploaded to print out a stream of numbers to Serial and then Arduino is plugged into the Raspberry Pi via the USB cable along with speakers into the Raspberry Pi’s audio jack.