Otama-DON'T

The Contraption
Our 3D Printer
3D Printer Printing
Jank City
Slicer

What the hell is this?

This is an device with the sole purpose of playing an Otamatone. Yes one of those weird eighth note shaped digital instruments and like you find on YouTube playing meme music.

This device is an unholy amalgamation of various 3D printer hardware that is being tricked into thinking that it's a 3D printer with a 450mm x 5mm build area and maybe a Z axis. Yes you read that right.

To say this thing is a little jank is a bit of an understatement.

Inspiration

The existence of free will and the lack of adult supervision. In all seriousness, I have no idea what inspired this other than I had an Otamatone on hand and malicious intent.

What it does

Can take most MIDI files and parse them out into a single note stream and create G-code for a custom 3D printer setup strapped to an Otamatone

How we built it

-Python and caffeine -Lots of hardware laying around and caffeine

Challenges we ran into

-Hardware design, -Midi can play multiple notes simultaneously, such as chords; However, our instrument cannot. So the entire note stream must be processed down to something usable. The output midi is included with the G-code

There is no windows support because the python does a lot of file operation for Linux
Some midi files cannot be opened
Apparently, telling Klipper that your printer doesn't have Z axis will cause it to become so upset to the point it will brick your Raspberry Pi. Or at least that what it felt like. We do not have any further explanation for why it would've caused such a catastrophic failure but we would recommend you avoid such shenanigans.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

-The processed midi file actually kind of sounds like the original, although its technically a bad midi file due to the processing being for a 3D printer moving around, not note playing -The 3D printer rig works... to a degree, we may be missing an axis or two. But it certainly looks neat.

What we learned

Python can FULLY process midi files, to the point that one could fully create a new midi file from scratch if they wanted. There's a lot of interesting new projects that could come from that knowledge.
Attempting to build what is essentially an entire 3D printer from scratch is not a good idea for you mental sanity.