Janko Digital Piano

Its a fully 3D printed 88 key digital piano with as realistic an action as I could get using Hickman’s design and featuring an isomorphic key layout in the style of Janko. The electronics were custom designed to register key velocities based on the hammer’s movement instead of the key’s in order to align as close as possible to an acoustic grand piano, with magnetic sensors on the hammer backchecks to provide note-off signals.

The piano provides both an in-built pc+dac combo to generate sound through pianoteq, as well as an external MIDI I/O for use as a pure midi-keyboard.

More detail can be found through the youtube series I put together going over the design and assembly of the piano.

I started this project to combine two ideas together into a single ‘product’ that didnt exist previously (because if it did – I would have just bought it and moved on):

1. An isomorphic layout (Janko layout selected due to its similarity to a classical piano layout) keyboard meant to make piano playing more intuitive with each interval always ‘feeling’ the same (which also means chord shapes remain constant – just a single shape for a given chord no matter which key you start from).

2. A fully realistic acoustic style hammer action – at first I went with the typical Erard double escapement action design (as is used in grand pianos), but stumbled across the Hickman action which simplified the action while providing same or better repetition potential. Though this action never broke into the piano market, it was exactly what I was looking for so I decided to make use of it.

Overall I realize the project isnt exactly innovative, and more of a derivation of two previous innovations that never gained enough popularity, I feel its still interesting enough to submit.

It is used to play piano pieces, and features all the benefits of a realistic acoustic piano action (proper let-off feel, fully weighted keys, and the piano technicians that tested it out mentioned how its better than any digital piano actions they tried – and is in fact close to the feel of a grand piano – something I was aiming towards in the first place).

The isomorphic layout has its own share of benefits, though arguments both for and against it (when compared to the classical piano layout) can (and have) been made.