Wednesday, August 9, 2006
Guitar neck keyboard
I took some days’ time off from hacking but tonight I wanted to do something, so I assembled the one octave of buttons the guitar neck is going to have.
In the last post, I had the image of the inside of the headstock of the plastic guitar where I fixed six pots (knobs you can turn) in the holes of the tuning pegs. The upper neck area will be fitted with four touch switches (so you can trigger them by just touching them). The lower neck area now has twelve small pushbuttons arranged like piano keys, seven white and five black keys.
To drill the holes at the proper places I first measured the plastic neck case and drew a stencil in Photoshop which I printed, cut out and taped to the case:
I pierced the surface at the twelve hole centers with a screw and a hammer, peeled of the paper stencil and drilled the holes (with a drill bit suitable for wood). I had to dremel away some of the plastic frets around the holes so the buttons would mount flush to the case. I fixed the buttons et voilą:
I’ll still have to connect them, though. They are playable with the left hand reaching around the bottom side of the neck, just like when playing a higher chord on a real guitar. Their purpose will most likely be transposing some kind of musical loop or sequence into other keys or playing chords.
Keytar Project:
Part 5: My desk is covered in cables and stuff
Part 7: Lots of pots
Saturday, August 5, 2006
My desk is covered in cables and stuff.
Just two pictures of the progress. The interface is running (and small pizzaboxes are gread ad-hoc cases):
Grey ribbon cables are for lusers. Rainbow colored ribbon cables rock completely. Too bad this is not visible when assembled:
Keytar Project:
Part 4: Soldering
Part 6: Guitar neck keyboard
Thursday, August 3, 2006
Soldering
On Monday, the parts for the Midibox arrived from Mike’s Elektronikseite. I ordered the boards and the parts there because it saves a lot of time and is not much more expensive than getting everything from various sources.
It is Wednesday evening now and I’ve been busy soldering all the boards the last two days. I started with one of the easier small boards and did the “core” board last. The digital out board has no resistors yet because of the different LEDs that need different resistance to light up with equal brightness. This is how it looks now. The cables at the right side are power and MIDI in/out.
I am very happy that it works. I uploaded the operating system, MIOS and the Midibox64 application onto the microchip via MIDI and had no problems so far.
Today I bought the rest of the parts I need for my keytar: Pots, knobs, sliders and the small LCD so I can actually start using everything. With the LCD and four menu buttons you can access the complete configuration of the Midibox system.
The next tasks are drilling lots of holes into the plastic guitar, mount all those switches, pots and LEDs and wire everything as well as adapt the Midibox program so that it works for my ideas.
Keytar Project:
Part 3: MIDIbox inside
Part 5: My desk is covered in cables and stuff.
