A Piano for People Who Can’t Play Piano

There are few things more impressive than a person who is really good at playing an instrument. But that requires either extraordinary natural talent or many years of dedicated practice — usually both. Most of us lack the inclination and perseverance to reach such lofty heights and so the world is littered with the dust-covered instrumental evidence of our failures. Wouldn’t it be nice if those instruments could just play themselves instead? With this modern reinterpretation of the classic player piano, at least one of them can.

Player pianos, like you might see in classic films set in old-timey saloons, were either pneumatic or electromechanical contraptions controlled by metal drums or paper rolls, kind of like a precursor to the computer punch card. Those player pianos were wildly complex feats of engineering and manufacturing. Inflation calculators don’t generally go back far enough to get an accurate estimate, but a player piano at the beginning of the 20th century would cost something like half a year’s wages for the typical American.

The PianoPi is much simpler (at least from a mechanical perspective) and much more affordable. It can attach to any standard piano that has a full-size keyboard and it doesn’t require any modification of the piano itself. And yet, it is far more versatile than those old player pianos, because it can play virtually any song for which the user can find a MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) track.

As the name implies, the heart of the PianoPi is a Raspberry Pi single-board computer. Specifically, it is a Raspberry Pi 5. That takes a MIDI track and controls a massive array of solenoids that tap on the keys. There is a solenoid for every key, which adds up to 88 in total when you include both black and white keys. The Raspberry Pi controls the solenoids through daisy-chained 16-channel I2C MOSFET driver modules, which send current from the power supply to the solenoid coils. Some RGB LED lighting adds flair to the whole setup and makes it clear that this isn’t your granddaddy’s player piano.

For a user interface, the PianoPi has a touchscreen HAT on top of the Raspberry Pi. That displays controls for selecting MIDI tracks and adjusting the LED lighting effects.

If you want to hear the PianoPi for yourself, there are already dozens of popular songs uploaded to YouTube and the creator, who goes by Weegert on Reddit, is taking requests for more.