Hardware
PlayLight
A piano that lights up its own keys to teach you — real LEDs, real piano, real time.
Before the phone instruments, there was hardware: an LED strip mounted along my piano keyboard, driven by an app, so the lit keys themselves teach you scales, chords, and songs.
The breakthrough that still makes me smile: the real-time piano→LED bridge. Press a key and its light answers instantly — keypress → MIDI → a Python listener thread → a 2-byte serial message → Arduino → light. Held notes stay lit, released notes go dark; the strip simply knows what your hands are doing.
Around that bridge I built a desktop control app (~2,100 lines) — Home, Songs, Games, Chords, Scales, Improvise — with a trick I’m fond of: the mode buttons reprogram the hardware on demand, compiling and uploading the right Arduino sketch behind the scenes, opening the serial port, and tearing everything down cleanly on exit. Two light programs shipped: a rainbow C-major mode and a minor-blues progression.
Why I stopped — honestly. A similar commercial product exists, and the soldering-and-hardware side of the build wasn’t where my edge was. I looked at the board, decided my speed lives in software, and moved on. PlayLight is the earliest ancestor of everything musical I built after it — Academy’s lessons, the Scale Drum’s Learn mode — and it’s the project that taught me where I’m fastest.
Want someone who builds like this?
I'm open to opportunities. Tell me what you're building — I answer every email.