Piattuino Plate Robot

Some years ago, we made a travel to South America. We have also been in Chile, where we heard someone playing on a special musical instrument. I was fascinated of that instrument and I decided to build also one. Find the right plates, adjust some plates to the right tone in the scale and fixing it on a support, where some problems I had to resolve. After all that work done, the instrument sounds quite well, but for also being a good musician, like the guy from Chile, very much practice is necessary. To do practice every day needs much engagement and this is quite difficult for me, so I chose another way.

There are piano-robots, why not create a plate-robot? So I decided to give the control of playing the instrument to an Arduino computer and the name Piattuino is a synthesis of the Italian word “piatto” for plate and the well-known Arduino hardware.

In this video I will show you, how I started this project, I will explain the principal schematics of the Piattuino controller and finally, you can hear some song examples: