Building a light-up MIDI keyboard

After last night's BuildBrighton meeting, we managed to get our Oregon keyboard gutted and all the keys drilled with 3.3mm holes (ideally we'd have liked 3mm, as we're using 3mm LEDs, but the smallest available drill bits at the space were 3.3mm!)

This evening we spent a good few hours hot-gluing LEDs in place and soldering them together. In fact, we soldered them together before gluing them inside each of the keys

As we are going to be using a MAX7219 LED driver IC to turn our lights on and off, we thought it best to common the cathodes of eight LEDs at a time.

While this seems like the "right" way to do it, the time taken to get just eight keys done meant we'd still be wiring this thing in a fortnight's time! Partly because we're using CAT5 cable (which, although stranded, each "strand" is a piece of solid core wire and quite resistant to flexing easily) though mostly because cutting each length of wire to "just the right length" meant that manouvering one key to glue/solder the LED in place dragged all the others along with it!

Since we're using CAT5 cable and separating the strands, to create a looping, common cathode connection, it suddenly seemed obvious that we could use the pairs of strands from the CAT5 cable to wire each LED individually.

Suddenly things were moving along at quite a pace. As each pair consists of a coloured cable and a white-and-colour cable, we stuck with using the "white" cables for all the LED cathodes (at least then we know which way around to wire each light!).

Things slowed down a bit in-between mounting groups of  eight LEDs, as we tested each set of eight both before and after connecting all the cathodes together.

Here's how the keyboard might look, displaying a single C major chord. There's no fancy firmware at work here - we just plugged three wires into a breadboard and connect a 3v battery!

After three or four hours of soldering, gluing, testing, slurping coffee, soldering, gluing (you get the idea) we managed to complete the entire top keyboard.

Frustratingly, as we were working in groups of eight keys at a time, we thought we'd finished and started to pack away before realising that the keyboard covers four octaves from C to C.
Including the last C on the board meant we had 49, not 48 keys. Bugger!

It took a while, but eventually we ended up with a full keyboard, wired with 49 LEDs, all waiting to be connected to a controller board. Not only do we still have a PCB to make and some firmware to finish off, but we've a lot of wiring to do too!

49 LEDs, each with a wiring running to both anode and cathode legs - that's nearly a hundred wires to sort out and connect up. So it looks like this weekend has been taken care of!