The Kyub is a maker friendly, open source MIDI keyboard that provides a new window to musical performance. Capacitive sensing gives the Kyub extremely sensitive action and an internal accelerometer allows the volume of each note to be precisely controlled for versatile musical expression. You can attach multiple Kyubs to a computer synthesizer or digital audio workstation for solo play, jamming with friends, or composition. Almost any computer-based synthesizer can be used

Generally, the Kyub provides 11 fully programmable feather touch keypads on five surfaces of a 3 inch wooden cube, a three axis 3G accelerometer usable to control note volume, after touch or pitch bending, and a Teensy AVR microcontroller with native USB MIDI support programmable with the Arduino tool chain.

The internal circuitry monitors each of the keypads to immediately detect even the lightest finger touch reflected in a capacitive disturbance. Acceleration of the Kyub housing associated with a finger touch is converted to a note loudness which together with a pitch determined by the keypad is transmitted over a USB cable in standard MIDI format. The Kyub has low latency on the order of 3 ms providing a highly responsive musical experience.

The Kyub program can be easily modified to: change the notes assigned to each pad, change the MIDI channel and change the chords assigned to the chord pads in the chord mode, move notes to make them easy to play, change your instrument from guitar to klaxon, play almost any chord progression. More experienced programmers should be able to set the scale, adjust the note velocity curves, even map different instruments to different pads (say, drums and fife) to get exactly the musical experience you're looking for. We are hoping someone might program a loop recorder, a drum machine, an arpeggiator, assign pads to play musical phrases, tap into the accelerometer for after touch, pitch bending, or scale changes, squeeze the final bit of latency out.