Prototype with infinite pivot lenght

xooorx So long as it's technical lego, it qualifies as a technical explanation.

Indeed. And good thing that I did not say that I wanted to carve it by hand in walnut and put gold center pins 🤣

In any case, I wanted to do the LEGO for myself anyway, quickly recording it (sloppily) was a no brainer. Here it is:

It's in 3 parts (funny for a 20sec clip):

• showing just the parallel motion (infinite pivoting) of the key
• showing a possible way to give it the touchweight with a seesaw below
• same as the previous one with a different touch point which (if everything else is equal) will create less dip and heavier touch.

Actually, doing it in life has shown me one interesting feature!! It's always good to make prototypes, even LEGOs 😁 Suppose:

• the seesaw below can be moved back and forth (from pianist's view: left and right in the video), and
• the seesaw allows different levels of dip without problem (just a clearance problem), and
• the correct amount of dip is "fixed" by stops in the parallelogram or actual key

Then, by moving the seesaw back and forth (from pianist's view: left and right in the video) one could make this thing change the real touchweight of the keybed, not just the simulated one via the response of the audio! Wow! Isn't that amazing?

My bad... You were serious about the Lego explanation... Maybe it is a cultural thing, but in my neck of woods saying "Do you need to see it on Lego?" is something not nice to say...

vagfilm in my neck of woods saying "Do you need to see it on Lego?" is something not nice to say...

Ops, really sorry about that. I did not even thought it could be something bad! Just to learn the idiom, does it mean something like "you are stupid that don't understand this, it's so simple"? Weird about how different cultures have different ways to look at things and creating idioms.

vagfilm You were serious about the Lego explanation

Yes, I was serious and still am. I think using LEGO is a very nice thing to do for rapid pre-prototying (before moving to 3D printing for actual prototyping). As you might infer from the video, I need to buy more LEGO Technics kits, since I ran out of the "good" parts and had to steal some pink-house things from my daughter!

vagfilm My bad... You were serious about the Lego explanation... Maybe it is a cultural thing, but in my neck of woods saying "Do you need to see it on Lego?" is something not nice to say.

Here in the ‘states, this kind of expression/remark is used often enough in numerous variations that i no longer think of it as “bad” ….”not nice” or the like BUT it helps to know the context, such as here where there otherwise does not appear to be any bad blood/vibes evident 🙂 …. in a modern sense, “snarky” and “snippy” may be suitable characterizations ….. and maybe, folks from your neck of the woods are more formal/less vulgar.

Having spent years living various locales here in America, where each locale has its own repertoire of expressions to include a sub-section for snark, i first cut my teeth (translate: began growing some thicker skin ) during my first tour of the ‘burgh, circa 1978 …. where i first learned that this kind of not nice/bad/snark is generally known as “jag’in” ….. i was just jagin ….. as in “ just bustin your stones a bit” IE. a peculiar form of friendly endearment that to the uninitiated may look/sound like sarcasm as playful verbal warfare “ for cryin out loud drew, do you need me to draw you a picture of it?!” 😉 …. i’m just jagin but i think delvento was not.

Drew-r in Australia Lego is seen as evil satanic spawn because:

1. It is overpriced plastic junk
2. At 3am in the morning it can inflict serious foot injuries or worse! (Home Alone style!)

If someone buys your kid Lego as present without prior authorization then that's basically a declaration of war 😀

Perhaps similar sentiments exist in Portugal.

burkey

😅

As a kid from a poor country we didn’t have LEGO here and only a very few kids with rich parents (and maybe part of the socialist apparatus) had ones and I used to salivate a lot over LEGO. I was still a kid when the communism fell and they started importing them but my family was poor and LEGO was too expensive. Well, imagine my delight when my wife bought me a present a few years ago, my very first LEGO 😀 I mean, I could’ve bought myself a LEGO for a long time but I was already a grown man. The idea that someone got it finally for me as a present was a psychological trauma finally fixed after so many years 😃

burkey Perhaps similar sentiments exist in Portugal.

We are simple people... It's just another way of saying "if you cannot understand how it works, I will dumb it down to you with lego and maybe it gets evident"...

Here in Denmark, where LEGO is from, no associations exist between that word and something bad. The man who invented it named it from the first two letters from each of the words in the sentence "Leg godt!", which means "Play well!"

Don't ger me wrong: lego is well loved here and it is probably the best seller toy during Christmas (coincidently, I just bought a huge set for my daughter yesterday because she was running out of bricks for her house projects...). What I mentioned is in the contex of a conversation between adults 😊

vagfilm We have a similar expression in Denmark: "Must you have it cut out in card board?" This essentially means: "are you so dim-witted that you cannot understand it when it is explained normally?". Sometimes the phrase is used less aggressively: "To cut it out in card board …", meaning "To put it plain and simply …"

And the "make a drawing to you" in english (and also here). It's the same thing everywhere...

😅 😊 (the icon does not look embarrassed at all to me, like the one in PW)

Well, at least with my slipping of words, we all (and especially I) learned something.

I am still thinking of that possible mechanical adjustment which I mentioned in my last post:

RIP Then, by moving the seesaw back and forth (from pianist's view: left and right in the video) one could make this thing change the real touchweight of the keybed, not just the simulated one via the response of the audio! Wow! Isn't that amazing?

I think this is really amazing, and only because of this I might actually build an octave to see if/how it works in practice, even if it is useless to me. For sure after my Cybrid is complete though, so it'd be a while.

Perhaps we should ask @KawaiJames to come here and see if Kawai is interested in this? With all the smart mechanical engineers who must be behind their digital actions, I can't believe nobody has thought of this before.

RIP Then, by moving the seesaw back and forth (from pianist's view: left and right in the video) one could make this thing change the real touchweight of the keybed, not just the simulated one via the response of the audio! Wow! Isn't that amazing?

Not so fast, I think... You change the touchweight, but you also change the leverage of the key (ie, how much of key vertical down-displacement translates into vertical up-displacement of the action). So, you can only monitor the actual key movement to create MIDI events, since the action movements will change with each adjustment, and the calibration would be all over the place.
You can already do this in an acoustic grand action: if you change the screw-head type of capstan by a longer metallic piece, you can move the keys back and forth to different positions: that will also change leverage and alter touchweight. But now your hammers would be either flying off because of too much momentum, or would be still because the angular displacement of the whippen is not enough to make them move.
Boy, am I a sceptic or what???

vagfilm Boy, am I a sceptic or what???

Being skeptic is great in general, and typical of scientists like you are. Otherwise one would just waste all their time in conspiracy theories and creative nice-sounding pseudoscience.

And in this case, you are correct (but there is a twist). In fact this "touchweight regulation" won't work on a real acoustic action or even on a hybrid with hammer sensors (unless one adjusts only the sensors which is too much work).

However in this case there is no reason that the seesaw below the key moves a specific amount: any amount is fine. As in most digital pianos, the sensors can be in the key and the "action" is there only for giving some "right" feel. AFAIK, all the digital pianos with "fake hammers" have key sensors, not hammer sensors, and this one will be no different.

RIP Being skeptic is great in general, and typical of scientists like you are. Otherwise one would just waste all their time in conspiracy theories and creative nice-sounding pseudoscience

Not only that... You only have time to do a small number of experiments, so you need to choose wisely and be sceptic of your own experiments during your planning, otherwise you work a lot and end up with nothing to show... I believe that the most important thing I teach my grad students is to question their every move, and be the first critics of their experiments and data; then, once they are convinced that there is nothing wrong in their work, they should never let anyone question their results without the others doing the same amount of data probing that they have done already. Be sceptic, and then be proud...

Lego piano

spanishbuddha

Will it offend anyone if i were to say it looks like it qualifies as a hybrid?

Going back to this sort of stuff, here's a guy who also was serious about having a "too short of a pivot" while still wanting the action have a smaller footprint

https://youtu.be/S_vWSY5fdwQ?t=50

As you can see he also uses the parallelogram idea, however he makes the "double pivot" to move, which forces him to use a spring, which we don't like 🤣
I am still wondering why nobody designed, patented and sold something like this: it does not look any more complicated than existing folded actions, while at the same solving the major problem some of them have with playing towards the back of the key (Privia?) or with excessive size/weight (VPC1?)

RIP
The finger will exert force at a certain point of the key and the inertia of the hammer will act with the opposite force not necessarily at the same point, it will force the flexure to bend in some wrong axis and I doubt very much that it will be possible to design such flexure that will be stiff enough (comparable to a wooden key) in all axes other than the one it is supposed to move, certainly not from any plastic.