I'm friends with the owners of a local spooky bar. It's not just a great bar with gourmet food, there's a lot of depth to explore. They've rigged up a bunch of fun gadgetry. There's a mini escape room where dialing a particular phone number plays a prerecorded message and pops open a secret door. There's creepy audio in one of the bathrooms. There's a painting on the wall that jumps out at you as you pass by. There's thunder and lightning in the windows and a flickering fireplace.
One of the owners pointed me to a YouTube video of a guy who turned his upright piano into a player piano. They have a piano there that people poke at as they pass by to get to the bathroom. He wanted to do something like that to their piano. Turning it into a full player piano was probably out of the question, given time, materials, and tediousness of wiring up each and every one of the 88 keys. But there was definitely a nugget of an idea there.
I proposed a smaller-scale animatronic solution that aligned better with the spooky nature of the bar:
- Three individual low keys wired up.
- A trill (or stinger) of several high keys connected together, to give a bit of a bang-on-the-keys jump scare.
- Some lighting to better draw attention that something's about to happen (and IS happening).
- A distance/proximity sensor to trigger the animation when someone is close-by.
- Tie it all together with a microcontroller that not only controlls all aspects of triggering, animtion, and piano key action, but can also provide holdoff timers so that it doesn't get triggered too terribly often (to the annoyance of bar staff).
This project was a commission for a local spooky bar. I am releasing the design files for personal/private/educational use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. You're free to use this project as-is or mutate it into something else if and only if it's for private use in your own home.
If you'd like to use these designs in a public or commercial setting, such as a bar or restaurant, please reach out to me to work out a more specific commercial arrangement.