LED-Visualizer

What is an LED-Visualizer?

With an LED-Visualizer you can give your piano performance some extra perks. When you press a key on the keyboard the respective LED will light up in the color of your choice. We use the exact same technic for our videos and it is the same many other piano YouTubers like Patrik Pietschmann are using. You can choose between many different colors and gradients to visualize your piano play.
It is important to mention that the visualizer will only work for digital piano that are capable of sending their midi data to other decives. There also hybrid pianos out there like the Kawai NOVUS NV-5 S Hybrid which can be used for this since they have a midi port at the bottom.

If you're interested how it works and how you can install it, you should read the following passages. We will explain how we set it up in addition to the linked tutorials we used.

Needed Hardware

For the whole setup you need multible hardware components to make the system work. There are multible ways to make the system work but here we'll give you you all parts that we used for our setup. Some parts of them are optional and some of them are needed. Below you can find a list with all needed and optional parts.

  • Raspberry Pi 0
  • GPIO Extension board
  • LCD HAT for Raspberry Pi 0
  • AC/DC Power adapter + extension
  • Jumper Wires
  • Wire stripper tool (optional)
  • Heat shring tubing (optinal)
  • LED Strip (2x1m Ws2812B 144/LEDs/m OR 1x2m length (the one we chose))
  • MicroSD card (8 or 16 GB)
  • MircoUSB cable + charger for power the raspberrypi
  • Piano connection (MircoUSB to USB and USB to MIDI)

    • It is recommended to buy the charger for the raspberry pi from the official raspberry pi website. Generally you should only buy components that match the mentioned technical specifications. Don't try to be some sort of MacGyver unless you know exactly what you're doing or else you'll end up frying you whole system or at least some components of it. We had to figure it out the hard way :]

    For a detailed instruction check out this YouTube video by Music by Ant.

    Software To Use

    We are using the software that is created by the GitHub user called "onlaj". The effort he put into this is just amazing, you can check out his GitHub page to get the needed source code. He also has very helpful instructions on his GitHub so don't hesitate to read through it. There are two different ways to install the software. You can either download an operating-system-image or install it manually. For some reason the first option didn't work for us so we installed it manually. You don't have to code at all, you just have to install the software properly on the raspberry pi.

    If you're wondering how you can install it the one way or another, you can either read the instruction set up by onlaj or check out some YouTube videos where both installation processes are shown in detail. For the manual installtion I followed the instructions given by onlaj on Github. It is recommended to connect your raspberry pi with your WIFI. There are also tutorials out there that show you exactly how you can achive this (e.g. this YouTube video).

    When you pi is connectet to your internet and the software is installed correctly you can access your pi with SSH. If you installed it manually than you'll probably already know how to do this. For those you don't know: SSH is a way to connect remotely to another PC, in the case the raspberry pi. From there on you can create and edit files via your terminal from you desktop computer. The above mentioned instructions will explain how and when to use the needed commands in linux. This step is optional but recommended if you have to debug something.

    Create The Curcuit

    In this step you manipulate your LED strip in a way so that it can be powered with you power supply by using the power-adapter (the little black thing with the green top in the picture). In addition you establish the wires that will be connected to your raspberry pi. This step is hard to explain so the easiest way is to check out this YouTube video from Music By Ant he did a great job on showing and explaining what he does. You then can connect your LED-strip power-adapter to your power socket and the remaining jumper wires to the intended pins in the GPIO extension board on the top of the pi. You really should watch the linked video for detailed information during this part.

    Again, it is very important to use the specific parts that were mentioned earlier. Don't use a power supply with more than 5V or it will fry your LED-strip. Also make sure that your jumper wires that you put in the LED-strip power-adapter are not too close to each other. If the are too close it could happen that the jumper wires melt together which will end up in some disgusting smoke.

    Linking Things Together

    After you installed the software correctly, set up the wire connection from LED-strip to pi and power socket, you're almost done. All you now have to do is to connect your pi to the power supply predestined for the pi. You have to put the MircoUSB part from the supply into the left port from the pi (seen from above).
    The last step is to connect you Midi to USB cable with an USB to Micro-USB cable. First, you connect the Midi to USB cable with your piano then you plug the USB part into the MicroUSB to USB cable. After that you put the MicroUSB part into the pi. It is important that you put this cable for the Midi connection in the right port (seen from above).

    After that you can turn on the whole system. It is recommended to put all the needed power supplies into a connector strip. In this way you have to power the connector strip to power up the whole system at least that's what we're doing. If everything is set up correctly the LCD-hat will light up a few seconds later. If that's not the case there could be multible reasons for it. If you installed the software manually it could have happened that you did something wrong and the software is the issue. On the other hand it is possible that you did something wrong with the wireing if the LCD-hat shows the menu but the LEDs do not work. In that case you should go through the linked tutorial again.

    It can be a tough time going through the process if you have no idea what you're doing but the result is worth it spending the time and effort on it. If everything works you can navigate through the menu with the LCD-hat. There are a lot of features you can explore. You can record your piano play and save it to Midi, change the LEDs in various colors and much more. Our advice is to figure out the functions by yourself or to check out onlaj's GitHub post.

    About Us

    You can check out or GitHub account, visit our YouTube channel or you can share this website-link as well

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