Glockenspiel Hero

Follow along to the light animations to play a song with one or multiple people on an unorthodox instrument.

Brad Wylie

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Description

There is a xylophone-like instrument at the resort I work at. My goal is to wire a strip of addressable LEDs behind each note and program the lights so that kids(and big kids) can learn to play a tune on this unorthodox instrument. The biggest challenge for me will be programming the lights in a "user-friendly" way so that one knows exactly when to strike the note.

I'd also like to add another "hammer" to allow more difficult or faster songs to be played with more than one person playing along. I hope to implement a few buttons to aid in changing songs or difficulty level.

I plan to record all the notes individually and save them as .wav files. I believe there are 26 notes total. 13 ascending notes towards the middle of the instrument. I will upload those if anyone would be interested in composing some songs or coming up with suggestions.

The python code in the image above is ugly, but it's the part of this project I'll enjoy most. I've

Details

Instructables user, GhostStrype, made This Awesome Instrucables Page that helped get me started setting up python with the fadecandy board... I look forward to writing my own though, as they lost me a bit in the end.

I also used a Fadecandy LED Curtain Tutorial by Phillip Burgess on the Adafruit website:

Files

animation.py

My first attempt at an animation for one note. The strips will be varying lengths for the different notes.

py - 1.00 kB - 04/03/2018 at 17:17

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Components

1 × Fadecandy USB Driver Designed to make driving Neopixels easier
1 × Adafruit Neopixel Strips 10 Meters Black 30 LED/Meter
1 × 4300uF capacitor Otherwise you'd have a badtime
1 × 5v 10amp Switching Power Supply For driving lots of lights(but I still don't plan on having anywhere close to 10 meters lit full-power at once.)
1 × A Glockenspiel This entire project is conditional on support from the organization responsible for the glockenspiel.