Hack 555 Toy Piano for

Better Sound Quality

recalculate the resistor values

circuit4u

Nov 16, 2019·5 min read

There are many cheap DIY 555 timer soldering kits on eBay
(for example search: NE555 piano), which can generate sounds
at different frequencies, with 8 push-buttons.

They are sold as toy pianos. But the piano notes are way off. So
don’t expect to play any piece of music on these toys, unless
you are willing to do some hacking.

Fortunately this one on eBay comes with its schematic

This is a typical 555 astable oscillator circuit that outputs
square waveform to drive a speaker. As one of the keys from S1
to S8 is pressed, the C2 and different resistor path determine
the RC time constant that sets the frequency of the square
waveform.
The circuit is configured such that from right to left,
subsequent key press (from S8 down to S1) adds additional
resistor into the RC time constant, thus longer the period =
lower the frequency, just like a piano keyboard does.

One reason that it doesn’t sound like a piano is because the

frequency of the notes are way off. However we can “re-tune”
the piano by replacing these resistors with the correct values.

Scale on the Piano

Here is a very nice introduction about the scale (i.e.
frequencies) on a piano keyboard

So the key (pun-intended) is to generate these frequencies with

the steps: 2 2 1 2 2 2 1, out of the 2^ n/12 power
[ scale =: +/\ 0 2 2 1 2 2 2 1
[ freq_factor =: 2^ scale % 121 1.12246 1.25992 1.33484 1.49831
1.68179 1.88775 2

These are the multipliers in front of a major frequency, to get

all the notes in a scale. For example, C major scale, the major
frequency is 130.813Hz
freq_factor * 130.813130.813 146.833 164.814 174.614 195.998
220 246.942 261.626

It starts from 130.813Hz and after 8 notes reaches 261.626Hz

(Middle C), that is twice the frequency. In “fancy” music term
262Hz is one octave higher than 131Hz. (EE engineers who use
log-log scales in frequency response plots should be familiar
with these terms.)

(For details: Piano Major Scales and Frequencies)

Similarly armed with these frequency factors, you can walk up,
as well as walk down one octave, say from 698.456Hz (F5 on
piano keyboard) to get all the notes in a scale.
[ ff =: 698.456 % freq_factor NB.go down scale from F5698.456
622.254 554.365 523.251 466.163 415.304 369.994 349.228

It’s not a Major scale, but you can play music with notes of
these frequencies as well. (one octave higher than F Major, if
your piano teacher asks)

Calculate RC Time Constant for 555 Toy

Piano
Why pick 698.456Hz you ask?

It seems that is the highest (right most) frequency of that eBay

toy piano. You can certainly tune the 555 to Major C or other
piano scale. (I attached J-lang code and an example at the end
of this article)

Now let’s come back to our 555 toy piano. We’d like to show
that we can do better than the engineer who designed that $3
eBay toy piano.
For example to generate 698.456Hz, with the existing CAP.=
100nF, R5 =
[ r5 =: (% 698.456 * 1.4 * 100e_9)10226.6

We omit the R1 in the schematic, because it is relatively small

comparing to R5 =10 kΩ (1/2*R1 = 500 Ω).

Two important engineering lessons:

 make approximation first to ease the math, but then

verify that the result validates the assumptions for
the approximation.

 resistors don’t come with arbitrary values. They

follow an exponential scale (just like our music
notes). (standard resistor values). You can certainly
put multiple resistor in series to have more accuracy
of the RC time constant. But we are making a $3 kit
on eBay, let’s put our engineer hat on.

So the toy piano’s R5 is exactly 10kΩ, kudos to the engineer.

But the accuracy goes downhill from there, as we look at R2,

R9, R8, ….

For subsequent notes, the resistors adds onto the RC time

constant of the previous one, so the frequencies go lower and
lower. We need to calculate the Δt, then the add-on (next)
resistor
[ dT =: - 2 (-/) \ % ff NB. time difference0.000175333
0.000196804 0.000107263 0.000234041 0.000262702 0.000294873
0.000160714[ rs =: dT % 1.4 * 100e_91252.38 1405.74 766.168
1671.72 1876.44 2106.24 1147.95[ rr =: r5 , rs NB. ideal10226.6
1252.38 1405.74 766.168 1671.72 1876.44 2106.24 1147.95

So from the calculated values of ideal resistors, we pick values

from E12 standard resistors
[ rr2 =: 10e3 1.2e3 1.5e3 820 1.5e3 1.8e3 2.2e3 1.2e3 NB.
redesigned10000 1200 1500 820 1500 1800 2200 1200

These are resistor values for R5, R2, R9, R8, R7, R6, R4, R3,
obviously very different from the majority 2kΩ in the original
schematic.

Here is the comparison of frequencies generated, our redesign

and the original $3 toy.
frequencies of notes

The red line shows the exact frequencies of a perfectly tuned

piano notes. Green line is our re-tuned toy piano. (Because our
resistors lean towards the smaller side, the frequencies are
higher.)

The blue line is the original $3 design. You don’t want your
piano teacher to hear the sound of that.

In addition, here is the resistor values to re-tune for C-Major

scale, if you’d like to try it. I picked values from E24 standard.

R5=27k, R2=3.3k, R9=3.6k, R8=2k, R7=4.3k, R6=1k,

R4=5.6k, R3=3.0k
It is not a two-thousand dollar digital piano. But for $3+, we
are getting pretty close.

And here is the J-lang code to calculate these resistors

WRITTEN BY

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