THE MIDI CAPACITOR

Hello, welcome!!

Today we will be making a Capacitive Sensor, but with a twist! Normally, if you ever use a capacitive sensor, it will just be you pressing an object and a sound will be emitted from the downloaded computer audio or the buzzer, right? However, this time you will be able to use it as a MIDI device. A MIDI device is a "musical instrument digital interface", where you will be able to use components to connect to your computer and finally, make music! So today I will be showing you the simplest way to make a MIDI CAPACITIVE SENSOR. Let's get started!

Step 1: Prepare Your Components

1 x buzzer

2 x 1M Ω

8 (aprox) x Jumper wires

Arduino board

Step 2: Create the Circuit Board

Get some wires, some light bulbs, and start creating the circuit as shown above. You can choose to follow the diagram, the one I made or even make your own capacitive sensor circuit. The buzzer will be an indication to see if it works, after giving a gentle touch to the wires. There shall be beautiful melodies emanating from your buzzer, but that is of course, after we've typed in the code.

Step 3: Coding !!

This will not be the last code but type this out to check if your circuit is working and we can move on to the next step. * Remember to download the Capacitive Sensor library *

Library - https://playground.arduino.cc/Main/CapacitiveSenso... (go to that website and you will be able to download it from there)

Step 4: MIDI Timeee

With the circuit board working, we will now make the capacitor into a MIDI controller. You will need to download two applications, 1 is called the loop MIDI and the Hairless MIDI to give a port to our circuit for our computer to be able to read it, and have a bridge to connect to the computer. By adding the few codes to the Arduino code before, the capacitive sensor would turn into a MIDI device. To test the sound you can go to any music software online and just connect the port. In my case, I've used Bandlab. After uploading the code, be sure to not leave any serial monitors open and create a port with Loop MIDI and connect your port to the midi output of hairless MIDI. If everything goes well you should be able to see green dots on the Hairless MIDI.

Loop MIDI - https://www.tobias-erichsen.de/software/loopmidi.h...

Hairless MIDI - http://projectgus.github.io/hairless-midiserial/

Step 5: Play the Music 🎶🎶

After all the steps we have done, your MIDI capacitor should work. In my case, as I referred to in the earlier step, I used Band lab to play my music. After selecting my port ( loopMIDIport ), the music will play on the computer after you press the wire from your Arduino. You can choose to add more wires doing the same step or just play it like this. At this point, the buzzer on the circuit will not be used as it was for us to check and see if our circuit was working. Now you have your own MIDI device, isn't it so cool? You can try it out with different materials, eg. leaves, a pencil (carbon), fruits, and many more! I hope you had fun building this project. :))

Step 6: IDEAS for Fun :)

This step is just to show you the potential of MIDI devices. You can build a guitar straight out of Arduino and have the device play music into your computer just like a legitimate MIDI device. Embrace your imaginations and have a blast!