30 Jun 2016
Student's create the popular project, the banana piano(remixed using green beans), in the final episode of the ScopeIT Education, Exciting Electronics course for Term 2 2016.
Wait what? - A piano made of beans?
You can turn any conductive object into a keyboard key, in this case we used green beans.
All you need is a simple circuit using an Arduino electronics kit combined with some basic computer coding and Bob's your aunty, you've got a piano!.
You are a resistor; electricity can flow through you to make a circuit and when it does it can trigger an event (in this case a note to be played).
When you touch the green bean with one hand and you touch ground with the other hand, your body completes the circuit pulling the Analog(A0) pin on the Arduino towards ground (0V) . The Scratch for Arduino program then runs code written by the students to interpret this event and plays a note.
We enjoyed this lesson so much that we did it twice - it's clear the students learned a lot about circuits this term!
Amelia Shorter
ScopeIT