Play the piano pedal with your head.
bFaaaP is an AI assistive system that sustains piano notes without a foot pedal: an iPhone reads your head angle and signals a device over BLE to operate the pedal — for players with limb differences, children and the elderly. Now open source. Alongside it, we write about medical AI, software and intellectual property.
What is bFaaaP?
Sustain with your head
The iPhone reads your head angle with AI (ARKit / TrueDepth) and turns it into a sustain signal — no foot needed.
Pro & Switch over BLE
Over BLE, Pro drives a motor that presses an acoustic piano's pedal; Switch plugs into a digital piano's sustain jack (patents 6726319 / 7004771).
Fully open source
Hardware build, firmware and app code are published on GitHub under clear, permissive licenses.
Piano recital 2026, at Musicasa
On August 7, 2026, bFaaaP joined the recital of Kyoko Yamaguchi’s piano studio Fleur at Musicasa in Yoyogi-Uehara, Tokyo.
- 0:00 “Etupirka” (Taro Hakase) — played by Dr. Tomo Shishido
- 3:39 “A Whole New World” (Alan Menken) — played by Mr. Haruto Tanaka
- 8:11 Setting up bFaaaP Pro, step by step
The team around one table after the recital, August 7, 2026.
Published with the consent of everyone shown. Please do not download, copy, redistribute or repost this photo. If you appear in it and would like it changed or taken down, write to shishid@saaipf.com.
Support the bFaaaP Open Source Project
Your support goes mainly to AI build-support, so anyone can make bFaaaP. We gather questions raised forum-style on GitHub every day and draft answers with a local AI, grounded in bFaaaP's primary sources (schematics, circuit diagrams, code), with web research and clear figures, and a maintainer reviews each answer before posting. Every Q&A is kept as a growing local knowledge base that makes future answers better. Because the AI runs locally — not as billed server-side API calls — running costs stay low; your support covers curating the sources, parts and maintenance.
Medical AI, software & IP — in plain English.
Localized editions of our Japanese articles: how medical-AI web services are built and deployed, how patents and open-source licenses interact, and case studies from the US and Europe.
Build it, study it, make it better.
bFaaaP is open so it can reach the people who need it. Star the repo, open an issue, or support the project.