MozART
The Raspberry Pi powered, piano driven, painting robot
Summer 2017
Raspberry Pi, LibreMesh
This was a fun project. It was an original idea, requiring the use of many fields of knowledge including electronics, programming 3d printing, mesh networking, mathematics, and creative thinking.
The inspiration came from the 2016 World Maker Faire where someone had hacked a piano to play Street Fighter. I made me look at pianos a little differently, and when I saw in the paper that Lynchburg would be setting up public pianos on main street that summer, I was struck with an idea.
I put a Raspberry Pi with a microphone inside the piano at the downtown market. It would listen to everything people would play, run a Python program I wrote to determine what note was being played, send that data along a mesh network one mile up mainstreet to the robotic arm sitting in the Academy's art gallery, which would then move and paint depending on what notes were played.
You can read more about this project with construction details here and a look at the resulting data here.
This one had some media coverage: Lynchburg Living, Richmond Times Dispatch, WSET, News & Advance