This Arduino controlled Robot Orchestra was built by the students of Reddam House School in Johannesburg, under the auspices of hackers from Bushveld Labs and shown off at Maker Faire Africa last week.

Everything is hand made, right down to the solenoids which use bolts and drinking straws for lubrication, and controlled from a customised input board which you can see towards the end of the vid. The guys from Bushveld describe Reddam as their prototyping place where they try out new ideas and experiment, all in the name of teaching kids about technology.

Apologies for the poor sound quality – the on camera mic couldn’t pick up all the instruments playing at once. We thought it was worth sharing all the same…