How to Make an Cheap Touch-Capacitive Piano

I'm a big fan of technology and music, and I decided to make this after I was inspired by my former life as a piano student. Anyways...

In this lesson, I'll show you how to make a cheap capacitive touch piano using an Arduino, speaker, and paper. I will show you step-by-step instructions to make this and how to connect the wires. In the end, you will have made your very own capacitive touch piano with 8 keys. Let's get started!

This project is based on capacitive touch sensing, which is a way of human touch sensing, that requires little or no force to activate. It may be used to sense human touch through more than a quarter of an inch of plastic, wood, ceramic or other insulating material (not any kind of metal though), enabling the sensor to be completely visually concealed. Human touch generates a charge, which is capacitance which is sensed and measured by Arduino. Depending on the level of capacitance, Arduino actuates a different note.

Supplies

1 Arduino Uno with an USB cable
16 Male-to-Female Jumper wires
8 Uncoated Paperclips
1 Breadboard
5 jumper wires
A pencil
Paper and cardboard
8 1M Ohm resistors
1 Speaker

Step 1: Prepping the Base

Solder one jumper wire to the base or the bottom of your Arduino where it corresponds to ~5 and connect the other end of the wire to an Male-to-Male jumper wire (I had to do this because my Arduino connector was broken) Put the other end of the Male-to-Male jumper wire on 44g on your breadboard.

Step 2: Keymaking

Make a keyboard out of paper and cardboard, and color in the keys darkly using a pencil. You can find a template here for the keyboard and then print it out: Piano template

Step 3: Schematics

Follow the schematic in where to put the resistors, Male-to-Female jumper wires, ordinary jumper wires, and the wire for the speaker.

Step 4: Paperclips

Solder 8 uncoated paper clips to 8 of the male-to-male jumper wires; these are your capacitive touch keys. Then after you do that, put them on the top of your keyboard, each paperclip corresponds to one key.