MIDI Glockenspiel

So I have been inspired by a post over at NerdKits where they made a solenoid actuated glockenspiel. Quite impressive, and I figured why not have a go using the roboduino arduino board.

If things work out well, what I hope is to be able to have the glockenspiel play using the MIDI output from my You Rock Guitar MIDI controller. Am looking into getting a dedicated shield to aid this.

A couple of little proof of concept videos, the first is testing out the shift registers required. I opted for 74HC595 8 bit registers which have a latch function.

The next is of a solenoid I made striking a test note which the tuner on my phone tells me is approximately a D#.