New instrument design project
On the right is the current body of the most recent protype of my "stringless guitar." It is stringless in the fact that the way you play it is by moving your hand Infront of distance sensors (SR04 sensors), and not actually interacting with a string to change the tone. All of the components and machining was sourced from Virginia Tech's Engineering Lab Frith.
The slide gallery below shows the different iterations it went through
Technical information
A single lane of the guitar has multiple components; notable ones being an Arduino Nano, a large piezo speaker, an amplifying cone, a power switch, a volume potentiometer, a tone potentiometer, and a SR04 distance sensor. Together they have a shared bread board and hinged cover housing all of the different components securely.
​
The code takes a mix of the tone potentiometer and distance sensed to determine the tone, and the volume potentiometer will either end the voltage (off), send it through a resistor (low), or directly send it to the speaker (high).
A short demo!
Skills learned and used in the process
-
laser cutting (specifically for wood)
-
Dimensioning, CAD modeling, and 3D printing
-
Voltage control
-
C coding
-
Circuit/ Arduino Nano simulation testing and design
-
Soldering
-
Practical knowledge of sound and the geometry of sound
-
braiding! (for the guitar strap)
(Frith lab in the background )