FM-based Wireless Electric Guitar!

Hello! Today, as part of our charitable efforts here at Techjango, we're giving you a tutorial! Involving electric guitars, at that!

This is going to be a fun little project where you, by your own hands and tools, will make your guitar go WIRELESS. Now, I'll lay out the cons right away for you – we use an FM band in this tutorial, which requires antennas that, while not too long, aren't the shortest either. The second con being that we here at Techjango, being the bare-wallet'ed engineers that we are, have to keep our costs low, and so the FM transmitter and receiver modules we used weren't exactly the most precise, audiophile-happy ones.

Now, why do this? Maybe you're room is incredibly messy and you want to avoid an additional cable. Maybe you want to have a 'ghost' (guitar) amplifier just to spook your friends. Maybe you're a newbie to wireless transmission and want to sink your teeth in just a little bit. Even if its none of these, there's always one never-ending reason – to learn and to have fun, simultaneously.

Step 1: Parts

-Wireless FM audio-centric transmitter & receivers: We utilized these two modules, both sourced from the nice folks at Seeed Studio. They cost around $8 each, which isn't too bad.

-Two Arduino-bootloaded atmel microcontrollers. An fresh atmega8 costs, what, ~$5? You can use one of the many means available on the Great Goog in the Sky to write the Arduino bootloader onto the microcontroller. We happened to have two spare Arduinos so we just used the Atmega chips right off them.

-Two 16 Mhz oscillators, each costing around the same as a speck of dirt.

-Two 7805 regulators, or similar – cost $1 or less.

-A TL071 opamp or similar – also costs $1 or less.

-A 1/4” female TRS plug. Costs $2 or less.

-Several Rs and Cs– You should have lots of these with you already (or at the very least, know where to get them from in the handfulls) if you're even a beginner in electronics. Also dirt-cheap.

(pssst - a good directory of distributors)

Comments

[devaspora]

I looked it over and maybe I am missing something, but what resistors/capacitors are you using, what values and most of all why?

[arnarg]

Very nice instructable!
Can you recommend any other (read: more expensive) module for better sound quality? Also, can you upload a clip of sound quality?

[TechJango]

I'm afraid we can't. The circuit is lost, disassembled and/or salvaged by now considering how quickly we keeping switching to newer, more-urgent projects. But I personally did come across a module that could possibly do the trick with better sound quality + short, inbuilt antennas - the Bluegiga WT32 bluetooth module (available at Sparkfun https://www.sparkfun.com/products/8771). If I recall correctly, it has dedicated audio in/out pins that one can use.
-Faizan

[Terry2030]

Hi,
It looks very nice but I think I missed something somewhere. As I look at your final pic I see a guitar cord going to your guitar. That doesn't seem like wireless. Maybe I did miss something. Can you help me out here ? You did a very good instructable but it is 9:23 AM here and my mind isn't working right yet Hahahaha !!!!!

[TechJango]

Hello Terry! Well, we do have to wire the guitar to the transmission circuitry somehow (You can see the transmission circuit in the 2nd picture in the last step). We ended up using standard guitar cable to wire that circuit to the guitar, so thats why you're seeing the guitar cord in the last step's 1st picture. The more crafty DIYer's would put the circuit away in the back of the guitar, wiring the guitar cable to it internally.

Hope I explained well? Thanks for your comment. : )

[TechJango]

Well, this is a pleasant surprise. Featured on the main page, 1200+ views... Honestly, we weren't expecting this response and were unprepared for it. So do let us know of any faults, objections and problems so that we can try to correct this instructible. Thanks!