Modded Cyber Kat MIDI Keyboard

With the advent of microcontrollers and inexpensive sound output elements, what passes as kids’ music toys today could often be considered legitimate musical instruments in their own right. In fact, with the right skills, one could likely play an impressive tune on a stock Cyber Cat MIDI keyboard. However, simply playing it in its stock format wasn’t good enough for maker John Park. He instead turned it into a MIDI device, using an RP2040-based Kee Boar driver.

Results are shown in the video below. The hacking process for such a device is fairly straightforward conceptually, though it certainly has its challenges in execution. Here Park intercepts keyboard matrix inputs with the Kee Boar, which can then pass along the corresponding MIDI messages to a digital instrument. In theory this sort of setup should be usable with any standard MIDI device, but here he’s using with an iPad with the help of an iOS Lightning to USB OTG cable adapter.

In addition to the Kee Boar, Park also added an accelerometer to what was formerly an ice cream cone microphone, using it as a gesture-based input. As a finishing touch, the Cat keyboard was painted black, perhaps to show how cool it now is.

While you may or may not have a Cyber Cat to mod, the concepts presented here should be applicable to modding a wide range of electronic devices, musical or not. Maybe you have a device lying around that's just asking for an upgrade, or perhaps you'll come across one soon!