In testing
EMS pads
The glove
Piano

How we built it

Piano Plays You is a haptic glove that plays the piano with your hand.

Inspiration: Learning an instrument takes years. We asked what happens if the instrument teaches your muscles directly.

What it does: A judge names a song. Claude arranges it for five fingers. The glove plays it on the wearer's hand.

How we built it:

Finger locks. Five servos on badge reels lock every finger.
EMS. A TENS/EMS unit on the forearm contracts all the finger muscles, but only the one unlocked finger can curl and press the key.
Control. An ESP32 drives the servos and two relays that gate the TENS output.
Laptop side. A Python player streams timed note commands over USB serial.
Arranging. Claude (via the Anthropic API) turns any song into a five-key arrangement in a simple text format, checked by the same parser the player uses.

Safety: The glove boots disarmed, relays are hard-capped at 2 s, and there's a one-command emergency stop. Intensity is set only by a human on the TENS dial.

Challenges: Surface EMS can't target individual fingers, so we fire them all and use mechanical locks to pick the finger. Other headaches were per-finger servo calibration, power sag on the servo rail, and pad placement.

What's next: Faster notes (currently about 290 ms minimum), more fingers and keys, and a learning mode.