I built this during Covid. When I released it, some of the parts went out of stock or skyrocketed in price, no longer making this an economic DIY project. Now that things are getting back to almost normal, I thought I'd share it here and request feedback. This is a very niche project for people who like the same things I do: saxophones, Rust, mechanical keyboards and the Raspberry Pi.
You can overcome the RPi scarcity by migrating the code to the Teensy platform, which aside being cheaper and less power hungry than the 2,3,4 RPi, is a lot cheaper and more easily available. Not an easy task since there's no Linux under the hood, but there are some excellent audio/midi libraries to help. They already built commercial-level synthesizers with it. By combining the breath sensor data with other pressure sensors you could end up with a very expressive instrument.<p><a href="https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/index.html</a><p><a href="https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_libs_Audio.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_libs_Audio.html</a><p><a href="https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_libs_MIDI.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_libs_MIDI.html</a><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2674LdYW5I" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2674LdYW5I</a>
As the owner of a (recently revived) ewi-usb… I’m really curious about the mouthpiece bit. What kind of analog sounds are happening while playing this? Do you notice that reed age, strength etc are as impactful as on a real saxophone? Do you feel a need to swap mouthpieces for different styles of playing?<p>I love the idea and ingenuity to make this happen!
This is great! As someone who used to play sax a lot but doesn't have hardware experience, it's 100% the sort of thing I would buy if it were commercially available. Makes sense that it's not (ecommerce is a whole thing), but I don't really have the patience to source all the parts and assemble it.<p>Awesome project though!
This is one of the coolest things I've seen on HN. I am definitely going to try to follow the instructions on this in the near future! I don't even play saxophone, but now I am not definitely going to learn. I would 100% buy one of these, if not 3 so I could give some as gifts.<p>Thanks for sharing and seriously, awesome project. Almost brings a tear to my eye.
This is extremely cool. Surprised how good it sounds in the example video. Wish I knew enough about hardware to build one (OK, i also wish i knew how to play sax). Shame there's nobody shipping all the parts for assembly at home. In any case this is awesome, and one of the cooler things I've seen on HN recently!
There are some really cool wind synths out there<p><a href="https://m.youtube.com/@EddieEWI" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/@EddieEWI</a>
This is so cool! Interesting you can use normal mouthpieces. Curious how the sound works, does the reed need to vibrate like a real saxophone, or you just need to blow into it and some air pressure sensor picks up (forgive me I have no hardware knowledge)?
I had the chance of making one in Oct 2021 following Javier's advices on his docs. This was a lot of fun. I printed the 3 required parts on my Prusa MK3S 3D printer. Perfect at the first attempt. I learned how to weld, not so difficult and I could make it also at first attempt. The MPXV7007DP component was indeed difficult to find at that time, but I could find one at Farnell for 18€ (and Digi-Key at 19€). It seems it's still difficult and expensive to find at the moment (but available at about 25€). The result is very nice. The sound also very good with most of the effects you can have on a real sax. And I love the geek look of this sax.
Reminds me of the EWI: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EWI_(musical_instrument)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EWI_(musical_instrument)</a>. Which several people in my high school band would play in the locker rooms.
Since it's using keyboard keys I'm guessing it doesn't have any analog touch sensitivity (?) Not sure if that would be even needed on this type of instrument though.
My girlfriend knows how to play the sax and I know rust (and am a dj/producer!) - so I starred this and we plan to build it. Thanks for your contribution to our life!
The video doesn’t seem to load on iPhone (Safari). It loads a tiny thumbnail, then just spins forever.<p>Edit: it may be because I’m opening it from the mobile link (which sends the video to Safari), but I tried pulling up the repo directly in Safari, and it shows a whitespace placeholder for the video but that’s it.
Somewhat related, this guy is making a lot of cool instruments that looks reasonably easy to build <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/NicolasBras" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/c/NicolasBras</a>
If you want a really high quality premade thing like this, Johan Berglund is your guy: <a href="https://berglundinstruments.mediarif.com/" rel="nofollow">https://berglundinstruments.mediarif.com/</a>