March 24 Update

A lot has been updated since last time. Have some chords programmed in and will be expanding too. As well as the ability of adding a capo to your playing. The fretboard has been mounted to the neck of the guitar with hinges and locks.  Just check out the video, it covers it all.

On a side note I have been purposely not filming the build process like I was doing previously. There was just too many hours poured into video editing. It was a great way to document my work, but too tedious.

March 15 Update

Listen closely to my whistley nose!

LCD and Serial Communication

I have programmed all basic minor and major chords into the Arduino. My next is goal is to be able to select which chord you would like to play. This will be down with some push buttons and an LCD. The LCD Library that the Arduino uses is great, but it is use a lot of of the arduino's pins. With a shift register we can go from using 6 pins to 3. Anyways, I just wanted to share this Arduino Library I found and plan on using in my code. It writes to an LCD with a 595 chip (serial in parallel out). He does a great job documenting his work so it is really easy to follow.  Controlling and LCD with a Shift Register.

Here is the permanent circuit made for the LED matrix. There is also a plugin made to go into the arduino. Just trying to keep things organized which is always a good and smart way to build.

Plans

Yesterday I took the circuit for the LEDs, from the bread board, to a more permanent and hopefully final hard circuit. Since this portion is finalized I want to start coding in chords and scales. There are 2 ways I want to implement this: 1 - There will be buttons and and LCD screen which you can scroll through to chose the chords; 2 - While the guitar is plugged into the computer, run a program that can control what LED's are lit (this will be done with Processing). Those are plans for this weekend. I will upload pics of the hard circuit later this evening.

I am becoming concerned with space in the neck of the guitar. At this point I don't think I can make a Guitorgan AND have LED's in the fretboard. Since time is an issue (only a month left), a guitorgan might not make this round of the GuitArduino. However, just because this project is for my senior design, I am not going to ditch this project once it is all done. A Guitorgan like instrument will be later in the future, if it doesn't make this round it will make the next one. The determining factor will also be when the neck of the guitar is milled. I won't know how much room I will have to work with until then. Milling the guitar neck will probably take place during my spring break (in 2 weeks).

Lastly when placing the fretboard back onto the neck, gluing it back on probably won't be an option. If anything were to malfunction on the LED matrix, it would just be disastrous to have to separate the fretboard from the neck if it were glued. I would like to try and make it so the fretboard is mounted to neck with hinges, just like a small box/chest. The only trade off would be that the hinges and locks would get in the way of your playing, but hopefully I can find a small enough hinge and lock so that won't be an issue.

Update March 8, 2011

Here is the LED matrix of the fretboard of the GuitArduino going through some sample code.

Update March 5, 2011