The Haxophone is a Hacker's Digital Saxophone

Funding Website Things is a regular section on the weekly Electromaker YouTube Show. As the section name suggests, it focuses on crowd-funded projects, mostly hardware fitting the Maker and Embedded community.

There are many projects that stand out for their wonderful execution, or laser-focused use cases. Some projects, however, stand out in other ways. Enter, The Haxophone.

Now, I want to make clear straight away that I don't think this lacks any of the laser focus and wonderful execution that other projects do. It does, however, look quite striking, and the concept of a digital saxophone using mechanical keys seems wonderfully wacky. At first.

Things go deeper than it seems, however. We get overly excited about it in this Electromaker Show section:

This is a Raspberry Pi HAT, featuring its own audio amplification meaning it will work with any kind of Raspberry Pi. It also features a breath sensor and sensibly placed mechanical keys (apparently close enough to actual sax keys for bi-directional muscle memory to work).

On top of the hardware, which is customizable and easily repairable by nature (good luck getting a digital saxophone repaired), there's a custom input system written in Rust, designed to work with the FluidSynth open source software synthesizer.

What makes this such a compelling project is how wide reach it could be. Even beginners to the Raspberry Pi could get it up and running. At the other end of the scale, if you are comfortable making your own 40-pin converter and accounting for the keys I2C/I2S sensors, you could hook this up to anything. 

To find out more about the Haxophone, and to register your (considerable, bordering on unsettling) interest, head to the Crowd Supply pre-launch page. We'll definitely be returning to this one when it goes live!