Player Piano Project Branch: Hard drive actuated piano

a.k.a Festplattenlaufwerk Klavier

While rebuilding a piano player to its original glory is fun, there are definite benefits to controlling the piano electronically, namely through MIDI.

The original intent of this project is to make such a retrofit for my player piano. Sadly, if I wanted to do this with solenoid actuators, I would rapidly go broke. A cheaper alternative I came up with was to utilize the reader arms from dead hard drives. Everyone has dead hard drives lying around collecting dust, so its an inexpensive source of fairly linear motion.

The ultimate goal will be for the piano to basically operate as a MIDI sound device; taking MIDI signals in and playing the piano accordingly.