Piano HAT

Piano HAT: mini piano for Raspberry Pi

If you are a Raspberry Pi Lover who also loves making music, then you will confirm this mini piano HAT for Raspberry Pi is the perfect musical board for you!

The Piano HAT was inspired by Zachary Igielman’s PiPiano, who gave his blessing to this amazing, tiny, touch-sensitive piano add-on for the Raspberry Pi.

The Piano HAT is perfect to control hardware synthesizers, software synths on your Raspberry Pi, to play music in Python, or for plenty of other creative uses.

It is compatible with the 40-pins Raspberry Pi boards (RPI 4, 3, 2, B+, B, A+, and Zero).

Piano HAT features are:

• 16 capacitive touch pads (each of these touch sensitive buttons can be linked to their own Python function)
• 13 piano keys (a full octave range)
• Octave up/down buttons
• Instrument cycle button (perfect to use with synthesizers)
• 16 LEDs (they light automatically or can be controlled with Python)
• 2x Microchip CAP1188 capacitive touch driver chips
• It can control software or hardware synths over MIDI
• Compatible with Raspberry Pi 40-pins (RPI 4, 3B+, 3, 2, B+, A+, Zero and Zero W boards)
• Piano HAT pinout
• Python library
• Comes fully assembled
• Perfect together with the Drum HAT

Software
Each one of the 16 capacitive touch pads can be watched in Python and you can build any project you may undertake, just exploring all its functionalities. These touch sensitive buttons will offer you endless possibilities, you may even create astounding symphonies or concerts.

“Octave up” and “Octave down” buttons are dedicated buttons that will shift an octave up or down, expanding your creativity.

16 LEDs light-up keys. They help you follow your favorite tunes, or can simply be used as a visual metronome.

You can use the Piano HAT with plenty of either hardware and software synths, play .wav samples with PyGame or produce your original Piano-controlled contraptions. You can use the MIDI example to play music with Sunvox, Yoshimi and several others, or you may use a PyGame example with some great octaves of piano.

You can control your synth gear hardware by using Python. Connecting the Piano HAT via usb on a MIDI adapter you can output regular MIDI commands.

Check out the Piano HAT Python library for documentation, PyGame and Python MIDI examples and other.

Pimoroni Name: Piano HAT [PIM095]