EMEO Headless Computer
Turn your EMEO into a portable MIDI sax with built-in screen
Intro
What if your digital saxophone could go fully mobile? The EMEO is a sleek MIDI wind instrument, but it’s tethered to a computer for sound. Enter this project: a 3D-printed saxophone bell that houses a full Windows computer, complete with a circular screen, battery, and all the MIDI magic you need to play anywhere. Whether you’re busking on the street or jamming at home, this setup turns the EMEO into a portable, standalone instrument—with a touch of absurdity and a lot of fun.
Concept Origin
This concept came like most from a pretty simple place. The EMEO is a very well designed and aesthetically pleasing Midi Instrument. It's a digital wind instrument with a metal saxophone body housing. It looks great, and feels great to play. One of the challenges with it though is that it has no onboard sounds or ability to make noise. It purely generates midi notes, which in turn can be fed into a midi instrument to play sounds. This essentially means you need to be plugged into a computer to play the emeo. Not a killer but it would be really nice if you could instead walk around while playing the instrument. The ultimate goal was to be able to Busk or otherwise walkaround with the instrument playing music, as if it was a "normal" acoustic Sax, but with the freedom and flexibility of Midi sounds.
Design & Development
The vast majority of MIDI instruments are hosted on "normal" computers; Mac, windows, Linux. Since successfully creating a sound using midi requires several real-time processes to occur simultaneously. Long story short, it wasn't feasible to use a micro controller to have a good quality stand alone sound. thankfully NUC computers exist. These are solid state computers (no moving parts) that are only slightly larger than a small remote control. They are easy to power off of USB battery banks. Run full fat windows OS and have their own HDMI out port (one of the hardest parts to do with embedded systems) Once I landed on a reasonably priced NUC, the rest was finding a Screen, battery, and adapter cables to connect them all. While looking I stumbled across a Circular screen with an HDMI input. This opened up the possibility of the silliest final packaging. An Alto Saxophone Body. The bell of the instrument would terminate with a screen which would allow users to see the MIDI instrument they were working with, as well as possibly add a Venmo QR code or something similar because why not.
Prototype & Build
The design itself was pretty straight forward. I first ended up scanning in the EMEO since the surface was rather complicated and it required me to make some parts to clamp onto the emeo body without damaging it. Once I had the body in CAD it was pretty straightforward ot design a saxophone bell and pack all of the parts in place. I essentially made a standalone computer/screen/battery unit that just rests in the bell of the instrument. This unit was free standing which would allow someone to use it also sitting at a desk and not have to constantly have to flip their emeo around to face them while playing. The volume of the parts far exceeded most build volumes so the design ended up being several pieces glued together but with some keying features it wasn't all that bad.
Final Result
I'm pleased with the final design. I incorporated a slot to hold a simple Mouse/Keyboard combo unit to control the computer. Its literally a windows computer that fits inside of a 3d Printed Sax bell so the use is the same as any other computer, you simply log in, spin up your Midi Instrument of choice and start playing. The computer has a headphone out jack so it's trivial to connect the unit to an external speaker, OR it also has a Bluetooth connection so you can connect it to a wireless speaker as well. All in all, its a silly idea, and it executed well, what isn't there to like!
