History

The MIDI Accordion project started in early 2016 after succumbing to a burning desire to be able to play my favorite instrument whenever I wanted without disturbing anyone (like my downstairs neighbors, or my wife at 3:00 in the morning). My original plan was just to make a box of buttons to simulate the left hand Stradella bass system so I can practice fingerings (and play a MIDI piano keyboard with my right hand at the same time if I so desired). I didn’t think it would be possible to build an entire fully-functional accordion by myself.

Then I found AccordionMega: a project to do exactly what I really wanted. To be able to build my own MIDI accordion, and for under $100, seemed too good to be true. So I gave it a shot and dove right in… and I immediately became overwhelmed. Although I’m a software developer, I’ve never touched an Arduino before, nor have I ever read schematics or built circuits or performed any electrical engineering any kind. I had no idea what I was doing.

So I forked the AccordionMega GitHub project and read the wiki over and over, searching for the “Ah-ha!” moments that would help bring everything together. I ran into several walls, though. Links were broken, parts were deprecated, the schematics were drawn up in EAGLE (which is not free). It was an uphill endeavor to say the least.

Eventually things started coming together. I bought an Arduino Getting Started Kit and started tinkering. I found replacement parts for the bluetooth transceiver and the barometric pressure sensor. I downloaded datasheets and PDFs of instructions so I wouldn’t lose them to the ever-changing void that is the internet. And I logged everything: my hours, my parts, my prototypes, and the many, many pitfalls I stumbled upon along the way. And now I’m paying all of that information forward to you.

Anyone Can Do It

One of my goals for this project was not only to build an awesome MIDI instrument, but to put everything I learned along the way (and then some) in one place for others to follow. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m eternally grateful for Dmitry’s work, but for someone who knew nothing about electrical engineering the documentation was quite lacking, and I’m sure there are accordion players out there who would love to take on a project like this, but have even less experience than I did. So I put everything I’ve done onto this project page in hopes that it helps empower other future projects from fellow accordionists.

Credit

A huge thank you to the following:

  • Dmitry Yegorenkov for making the original project that made this project possible - I could not have done this without your work.
  • Jason Bugeja for additional resources on improvements to Dmitry’s project and for providing additional suggestions for improvements to my project.
  • Dean Attali for making the theme of this project page, Beautiful Jekyll.