I found this this morning and thought you all might get a kick out of it. It looks like he put a good deal of work into it.
Happy Holidays
~DK
with some minor adjustments, it’ll seriously be a whooper (if it isn’t already)
maybe add a music reader to it, too (maybe something as simple as the black & white patterned disk with a line tracker or light sensor)
Very cool, very inventive. Love the use of the VEX open ended wrench as the striker. I wonder if the pulled the tubes off another instrument or cut them to length.
He said that he cut them from an aluminium pipe and tuned them. The issue i saw was that sometimes (once or twice) there was a gap as the linear slide had to move over and the other issue was that when the pipes began to rock back and forth there were a few missed hits. Overall I thought it was a great robot he made there.
~DK
1899 was going to build something similar for JVN’s design challenge, but we didn’t have the resources in our tight budget. I had a CAD model started of our “marching band” which would’ve had chimes, small congo drums, and a bike horn. 
The issue with the slide rail we resolved by using multiple slide rails with mallets. We wanted an input system with the computer keyboard as a sort of “piano.”
I like it! 