Electronic Chanter
My son plays the bagpipes, he's been playing for about a year and he's very good, but the bagpipes are an extremely loud instrument and require regular practice. He plays well, but I'm very concious that our neighbours probably don't want to hear it day and night, especially when he's playing the same tune over and over to learn it, or practising the same drills.
I've seen electronic chanters online, and even home built versions, so I wanted to try building one for myself, with my son. The below video is the very first prototype we built. The build consists of a section of wooden dowel (previously a curtain pole), drawing pins, a simple buzzer, and an ESP32 microcontroller on a LOLIN32 development board. The ESP32 has pins capable of acting as capacitive sensors. The drawing pins are the contact points, and the code detects the head of the pin has been touched when a configurable threshold is crossed. There are 8 holes on a chanter, so each hole maps to 1 bit of a byte, and each of the possible values (0 - 255) of the byte map to a note, played through the buzzer.
For the next iteration, I'd like to replace the buzzer with a bluetooth MIDI library, so it can connect to a MIDI synth app to play a more realistic bagpipe sound, play through headphones, record, etc. I'd also like to tidy up the hardware by making a hollow body to contain the wires and the microcontroller. Adding a battery would also improve the package. The ESP32 includes bluetooth support, and the LOLIN32 board includes battery charge circuitry, so it's all achievable without too much effort.