Getting Closer
A week of ups and downs — feeling incredibly unmotivated, lower than ever before this semester, but contrasted with some of my biggest successes yet.
LED-embedded Guitar & Distortion Circuit
This week I finished wiring the connectors that allow my guitar to communicate with an Arduino and distortion pedal.
Between all the LEDs up the neck of the guitar, the accelerometer leads and a common ground, I needed to run 11 different wires from my guitar to my enclosure. I ended up using two heavy duty 5-pin connectors that screw together to ensure the connection is solid as well as a separate crimped connection for a solo ground wire. By painting one of the connectors black, I’m able to easily distinguish which connectors belong together.
After finishing these connections, I was able to begin prototyping the code again for the distortion pedal that the accelerometer and Arduino control. The first thing I wanted to tackle was to not only make sure all the LEDs worked, but worked when they were supposed to in accordance with the accelerometer’s orientation. At first things seemed to work perfectly — as the guitar was tilted upwards, LEDs would turn on. But then (as seemingly nothing can ever just work), some of them wouldn’t fire. After some troubleshooting I noticed some of the LEDs legs broke clean off, easy enough fix, but the others that wouldn’t light were being sent either too high of a voltage or no power at all — still need to figure this bit out, but it functions for the most part.
On the neck itself, I used epoxy to fix frosted acrylic circles to be flush with the fretboard to diffuse some of the LEDs’ light. When no LEDs are lit, it’s pretty difficult to see there’s new holes in the guitar at all — very pleased with the results.
Finally, I began toying with different algorithms to help smooth the values being sent to the distortion pedal. As it were before, each LED that would light meant a different state — a different set of values to be sent to the pedal. This solution was very choppy and didn’t allow for seamless transitions between states. As of now, I’m using the orientation of the accelerometer to incrementally add to or subtract from the distortion and the overall level of the pedal while simultaneously lighting up the LEDs as I had it previously. Getting closer, but not all the way there yet.
Distance Sensor Circuit
As stated on a previous post, I was having issues getting a new tremolo pedal to work to its full capability with my distance sensor setup. But fortunately, I had a breakthrough.
Quite literally this morning before writing this, I was wondering what other pedal I have here, in my home, to use in place of my troublesome tremolo pedal. And then it hit me — I can use that gross, old phaser pedal I prototyped with back in December. After replacing its 9 volt jack and some of the old corroded wires, I hooked it up to my distance sensor circuit and to my surprise, it actually worked. No rehashing code or troubleshooting — it just worked (this doesn’t seem to usually happen so let me have this one). Mind you, it’s an older pedal and doesn’t have the greatest audio quality, but it gets my point across and I’m much happier than I was with it about a week ago.
Enclosure
I finally glued the lid to the frame of my enclosure, gave it a dark stain and added a few layers of clear coat on top. It’s an odd feeling having all of this come together and to finally see this big wooden box I’ve been envisioning for months actually come to fruition.
Next, I have to add my power supply which is pretty much just a basic outlet that I’ll wire inside the box with one clean chord that can plug into a wall when it’s complete. As well, I plan on adding a laser cut and engraved GOSSHOUSE logo to the front of the enclosure to really brand it as the product I’ve been working towards.
After polishing up the code for each circuit, I can install everything into the enclosure and finally get this thing done.
The finish line is close.
