I also found some very hard and crusty pieces of cotton wedged between a few of the hammers that didn’t look like they were supposed to go anywhere and were blocking some of the parts
Those were the dampers, without them the sound will be "harder" and more percussive:
With such a big LCD I think it would be a fun addition to embed a PC inside it, with the keyboard of the piano acting as its... keyboard. After all, the original PC/AT keyboard only had 84 keys.
That's interesting. I'll look into adding fresh ones back in, but the existing ones were definitely getting in the way of the action, probably because of age. I'm not sure what the sound is like without them, but the whole system still sounds pretty good.
Oh also, there is a Mac Mini controlling the display. The next phase of the project is to install key scanning hardware that would detect key presses. So it COULD in theory act as a regular keyboard as well. The music would be pretty random though, but interesting.
Those were the dampers, without them the sound will be "harder" and more percussive:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Piano_action_-_Project_Gut...
With such a big LCD I think it would be a fun addition to embed a PC inside it, with the keyboard of the piano acting as its... keyboard. After all, the original PC/AT keyboard only had 84 keys.
...and those who liked the article might find this interesting too: http://www.linusakesson.net/chipophone/