Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
12 Auto Played Guitar
Instructor's Award
 Jiyu Hu
Peilin Rao
Qianlu Chen
 Yifan Chen design_document1.pdf
design_document2.pdf
design_document3.pdf
final_paper1.pdf
other1.pdf
presentation1.pdf
proposal1.pdf
Team members: Peilin Rao (peilinr2), Jiyu Hu (jiyuhu2), Qianlu Chen (qianluc2)

Problem:
Some people love the original sound of guitar music but lack the time and energy to practice it; Just like the existence and common use of auto-played piano in the lobby of grand hotels, some places may need a playing guitar for entertainment or creating atmosphere; guitar stores want to show the good sound quality of the guitars they are selling but it is usually very expensive to hire some to play for a long period of time; music creators want to hear the sound of their customized guitar for testing or for remix; some people may want to hear the authentic sound of guitar music as their wake up alarm. Our project auto-played guitar is a one-for-all solution.

Solution Overview:
We are designing a removable and easy-to-install hardware device that can be installed on any type of guitar for the purpose of autoplay. While automatically playing the guitar with pre-programmable music sheet is the main task, we are offering a few improvement of the functionally:
The auto-play system can be made as a clock, which means the guitar can auto-play at a preset time of the day.
Adding a microphone input on the guitar to make it listen to the sound from the surrounding as they replay them. And if someone just croons a piece of tune, the guitar can sort of reproduce it. This may be useful for songwriters who have a tune in their mind and want to hear it on guitar really quickly.
Adding a motor and a metal arm on the body of the guitar to make some drum beats from the guitar body.
Adding a bluetooth model that connects to a smartphone for inputting custom music sheets.
Solution Components:

Subsystem #1: Pressing Unit
There should be 30 linear actuactors to press the chord asistance that connects to the neck of the guitar. (Link to the chord asistance: https://www.amazon.com/XERGUR-Beginner-Assisted-Classical-Beginners/dp/B088T32ZQS/ref=pd_bxgy_img_3/146-1487337-9702813?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B088T32ZQS&pd_rd_r=8c08a869-4f5c-4ca5-ac20-8ab0993c23d5&pd_rd_w=52A8T&pd_rd_wg=0saUw&pf_rd_p=ce6c479b-ef53-49a6-845b-bbbf35c28dd3&pf_rd_r=6750PDR3ZKZGW98VPFBJ&psc=1&refRID=6750PDR3ZKZGW98VPFBJ)
Each of the actuactors can be controlled individually. It should be controlled by the process unit to quickly press or release or perform a set of actions in sequence.

Subsystem #2: Playing Unit
There should be 6 servors placed on the body of the guitar. Each of the servors are attaching and controlling one guitar pick that touchs one string. The servors can be separately controlled to adjust the speed of rotation and rotation angles in order to play the guitar strings.

Subsystem #3: Core control unit
A piece of hardware that contains the bluetooth module that allows different pieces of music to be programmed in the smartphone user interface and sent to the core control unit to send commands to the pressing unit and the playing unit.

Subsystem #4: Alarm
The alarm allows the user to set the desired time using push buttons and LED screen. When the time of the day is reached, it would command the core control unit to control the guitar to play a certain piece of music as a wake-up alarm.

Subsystem #5: beat hammer
A device installed on the bottom edge of the guitar with a small hammer to periodically knock the wooden surface of the guitar to create drum beats. It should also be programmable and controllable by the core control unit.

Subsystem #6: microphone
It can listen to surround sound and replicate the main tune by playing guitar. It should be activated from a push button and controllable by the core control unit.

Criterion for Success:
Every subsystem can work together to play a relatively complex guitar music, for example, Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin.

VoxBox Robo-Drummer

Craig Bost, Nicholas Dulin, Drake Proffitt

VoxBox Robo-Drummer

Featured Project

Our group proposes to create robot drummer which would respond to human voice "beatboxing" input, via conventional dynamic microphone, and translate the input into the corresponding drum hit performance. For example, if the human user issues a bass-kick voice sound, the robot will recognize it and strike the bass drum; and likewise for the hi-hat/snare and clap. Our design will minimally cover 3 different drum hit types (bass hit, snare hit, clap hit), and respond with minimal latency.

This would involve amplifying the analog signal (as dynamic mics drive fairly low gain signals), which would be sampled by a dsPIC33F DSP/MCU (or comparable chipset), and processed for trigger event recognition. This entails applying Short-Time Fourier Transform analysis to provide spectral content data to our event detection algorithm (i.e. recognizing the "control" signal from the human user). The MCU functionality of the dsPIC33F would be used for relaying the trigger commands to the actuator circuits controlling the robot.

The robot in question would be small; about the size of ventriloquist dummy. The "drum set" would be scaled accordingly (think pots and pans, like a child would play with). Actuators would likely be based on solenoids, as opposed to motors.

Beyond these minimal capabilities, we would add analog prefiltering of the input audio signal, and amplification of the drum hits, as bonus features if the development and implementation process goes better than expected.

Project Videos