Electronic Musical Keyboard

It is a simple keyboard that you can make at your home or in a makerspace. Also, a cool project for kids to play with electronics.

Placing your hand inside the glove, you'd be able to play the keyboard by touching the copper strips with your fingers.

Requirements:

Buzzer

A hand glove

Copper tape

9V battery

Resistors (assorted)

Alligator clips

Wires

Cardboard sheet (for base. You can choose any alternative material/surface)

Soldering equipment, Wire stripper, Scissors, Double sided tape, Electric (insulation) tape

Step 1: Laying the Keys

Cut copper tape strips, about 2 inches in length and arrange them in parallel over the cardboard sheet (or any base that you have chosen for your keyboard). You could design your keyboard in funky ways while arranging the copper tapes. Just make sure that they (in this case their metallic parts) do not touch each other.

Step 2: Buzzer and Battery

Place the buzzer and 9V cells on the cardboard sheet over strips of double-sided tape.

Step 3: Soldering the Circuit

Arrange the resistors with one leg touching on the top side of the copper strips. Solder these legs on the copper strips. Place another longer copper strip at the top end, under the upper legs of the resistors, and solder the upper legs on this strip. Bend and cut out the extra metal that goes beyond the soldered points.

Note: Arrange the resistors in either ascending or descending orders of resistance values to have decreasing or increasing tones respectively.

Solder a strip of single stranded wire across the negative terminal (short leg) of the buzzer and the common strip as shown. Then connect and solder the wire from the positive terminal of the battery (red wire) on the positive (long) end of the buzzer.

Note: The image shows the black (negative end) wire connected to the left side of the buzzer. That's incorrect and has been rectified in the next images. Connect the red wire from the battery to the buzzer as explained before.

Step 4: Making the Glove

Here I have used a cotton glove. You can use any type of glove. It would be better to have something that isn't to thick at the fingers.

Cut 4 equal lengths of single-stranded wire, just long enough for them to converge at the palm, starting from the finger tips. Cut a longer wire that can run down all the way to the base of the glove, from the thumb. Remove the insulations at both ends to about 3/4". At the finger tips, take the wire through and bring it back up, so that the wire can hold its position there. The exposed wire on the will create the points of contact for playing the piano.

On the longer wire, take out a little insulation at the point where the other wires converge. Create a joint between the all the wires and solder it.

The base of the longer wire is pierced into the cloth and then brought back up, just as on the finger tips.

Put small copper tape strips on the finger tips, from under the exposed wires that were brought back up. Bend and press the exposed wires on the tape to create solid contact.

Step 5: Clip and Play

Connect the alligator clip to the negative battery terminal. Clip it onto the base terminal on the glove.

You can now start playing the keyboard by touching the copper tape strips on the glove finger tips onto the copper tape strips on the cardboard.

FYI: When you touch two strips simultaneously, your are connecting the resistors in parallel and thereby will create a new sound.

Note: Make sure you don't use resistors beyond 10k ohms for a simple buzzer.