[Amir] recently finished a pretty cool project — portable musical Stairs! He developed and built it so it could be temporarily installed in schools for musical therapy sessions with autistic children — a fun activity for all ages!
The system utilizes lasers and photo sensors that come with a built in digital output with a sensitivity potentiometer, which makes it very easy for the Arduino Leonardo to interpret. The reason they are using 2 by 4’s for the system is because of the width of the stairs. At 1.75m across, a laser misaligned by only 1 degree results in it being about 3cm off!
On the software end of things, the Arduino acts as a HID input to the computer to create the sounds. [Amir] has put together a totally free sound sampler on his site makeysoundy.com, and we should say, it’s pretty fun! You can assign notes to different keys, which makes it very easy to make a similar project to this!
Stick around after the break to see the stairs in action!
While it’s a great project, maybe [Amir] ought to check out the musical stairs some students at Hack Princeton came up with last month!