You are reading these lines because you are insterested in the project's making off.

I have been using the technopipes for 8 years and have been happy of it, especially when I really knew playing the bagpipes.

This instrument has the advantage of well highlighting imperfect fingering noises, but its atypical ergonomics (screw heads instead of holes) is not ideal for learning.

Moreover it is very unstable because both top and bottom parts are not held ; I have worked around this issue by confectionning an upper end support.

I know several pipers who never managed to use it due to dry fingers.

For myself, my fingers are not that dry, but I can't use it after 20 PM.

In short the technopipes is not adapted to beginners and not ideal for others.

And it is expensive. I realized that when I lost mine and looked for replacing it : price has dramaticaly raised and features kept the same ...

I have had a look on all available electronic pipes, but found only big devices, all expensive.

So I decided to try to build an electronic pipe from scratch, based on brand new concepts : a printed circuit that could be inserted into an existing bagpipes chanter :

• respect of usual sensations
• realist feeling
• could be plugged into a bag
• stability of the device (resting on the thigh or plugged into a bag

Optical fingers detection without contact : holes should be perfectly closed, else note playing would fail, as with a real pipes.

• no dry fingers issue
• perfectly adapted to beginners

The board has a jack connector and is bluetooth capable ; local sound playing quality should be better than on a technopipes ; using bluetooth, sound could be remotly played by some PC, smartphone or tablete. in such case, sound quality could as high as whished because the piper provides notes.

If using bluetooth, possible features would be :

• wireless use
• dual playing with a bagpipes player : BagPipe (Windows/Linux/MacOSX) / AndroBagPipe (Andoid) / pocketBagPipe (IOS).
• dual playing with a MP3 tune.
• icing on the cake : the remote bagpipes player could, one of these days, draw played notes on staffs ...

User provided sounds for remote playing should be recorded by him ; doing that, all traditional instruments could be played (gaeta, smallpipes ...).

An embedded metronome would be available.

Record and playback features would be available.

...

One year after, the product is up to date. All targeted features are available and some extra options have been implemented, such as radio link and MIDI output. Sound quality and electric autonomy have been dramaticaly enhanced.