Narrative
This was created to demonstrate a range of techniques. The capacitive sensing has been set to detect fingers a range of 2cm above the keys. Essentially a contact-less keyboard.. The keys are made from strips of printed circuit board, polished and then varnished along with the wood. Function changing is achieved using rotary switches. These are wired to give either a binary output, or use an analogue restive network. The keys have been angled purely for artistic merit so as to distinguish this device from a conventional keyboard. |
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The Polyphonic Plank being played by a visitor during a Sound Bytes presentation at a National Museum of Computing "Bytes Festival" in 2019 | |
Components | Description / Hardware Functional Areas |
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Bare Conductive
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Sound creation |
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Rear of planxtone. The strips of PCB are wired back to he capacitive inputs on the Bare Conductive processor board. After some prior experiment it was found running the connecting wires close together via the square conduit did not cause any "cross-talk". | ![]() |
Processor plus function selection switches and wiring.The bottom switch uses a resistive ladder network via the A0 analogue pin. The other two rotary switches are wired to pins 4,5,6 and 7 giving 00, 01, 10, 11 binary selections. | ![]() |
Proximity sensors wired in. | ![]() |
Controls Wired In Note the use of one rotary switches usung a resitive ladder and two using a simple binary output. |
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Finished | ![]() |
Control Panel Added | ![]() |
Done | ![]() |
And some more | ![]() |
Plank varnished, fitting PCB slices, i.e. proximity contacts | ![]() |
Gluing | ![]() |
Checking the fitting of PCB slices |
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Control Switch Cut Outs | ![]() |
Slots Cut In Plank | ![]() |
12 Slices of PCB | ![]() |
Plank and Blank PCB | ![]() |