Sunday, October 6, 2013

Test run

It has been quite a bad weather lately so this weekend I finally found myself the time at home to continue working in this little project. I received the power supply for the LCD controller quite some time ago so I had everything ready for a test run.

I made a small box out of cardboard to hold the LCD controller and cables and duct taped it to the rear of the LCD screen. It is not pretty, but it works.


I put the screen into place, connected the cables, launched piano booster in the laptop and voilá! I played through a few MIDI songs to see how comfortable the system is and the truth is that I really liked it.There are a few problems though:

  1. I need a decent pointing device, using the laptop touchpad to move the cursor around is not practical (the laptop is in the left side of the picture). I thought about two possibilities:
    1. Buying a touch screen panel and overlaying it over the LCD screen.
    2. Buying a laptop-style touchpad and attaching it to the piano (below the piano's yellow LCD) using a velcro.
  2. The piano sheet holder is too fragile to hold the LCD screen (specially if I decide to get a touch screen panel). I'll need to build something stronger to hold the screen on top of the piano.
Now I'm going to dedicate the next few times for building a proper LCD frame out of an aluminium sheet. Let's see how it goes..