How to build an Air Guitar with Arduino, aka the AIRduino Guitar

How to build an Air Guitar with Arduino, aka the AIRduino Guitar

The idea here is to build a wearable virtual guitar that is to be controlled with two hands much like playing Air Guitar. It has been created and prototyped during a two weeks project at Chalmers University (Sweden) for a Physical Computing class.

The aim is to get the feeling of playing a real guitar. The AIRduino Guitar is made of one glove and one stick. The glove is used to set the tone and the stick to trigger the sound.

To perform such trick, we used an accelerometer and an ultra-sonic sensor (see Step 1 for concept description).

Take a look at the video demo to get a more precise idea of how it works, and get to work to build your own!


The AIRduino Team:

David Fournier, Jean-Louis Giordano, Monireh Sanaei, Maziar Shelbaf and Gustav Sohtell.

 
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Step 1Concept Description

Concept Description
The Air Guitar is supposed to work as a right-handed guitar.

The guitar controller is divided in two parts, left-hand controller and right-hand controller.
By left-hand controller the player can bend his fingers and press the glove to change the pitch of the tone.

The right-hand controller is represented by a stick which has to be shaken to trigger the sound of the air-guitar.

Player can also change the distance between right hand and left hand in order to pitch the tones, simulating the different frets on the guitar neck.

To perform such tricks, the main components are an accelerometer to "feel" the stick shake, an hacked ultra-sonic sensor to measure the distance between the right hand and the stick, and conductive fabric to build the glove.

All in all, it is an fairly easy to build toy. The only tricky part would be the ultra-sonic sensor hack which requires some dexterity. You will need some basic electronic skills to understand the instructions, and also to find out what you did wrong when you messed something up and the guitar doesn't work in the end. We have been there. :-)

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12 comments
Nov 18, 2009. 3:38 AMdikos says:
What Accelerometer suggest for this build?
Oct 31, 2009. 12:18 PMeggyeggyeggy says:
It might just be me being dumb, but why does it say to be continued on how to building the glove bit?
Awesome project anyway
Nov 10, 2009. 2:00 PMdikos says:
The schematic design of the switches of 9,10,11,12 fingers correspond to what?
Nov 5, 2009. 1:45 PMdikos says:
Congratulations to the construct and I

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Oct 29, 2009. 5:15 PMmacattackct says:
 I don't know.  I was just stating it.  I didn't mean  to sound mean. Sorry if it came across that way
Oct 29, 2009. 5:15 PMmacattackct says:
 i dont know.  i was just expressing my opinion.  I didnt mean to make it sound offensive.  Sorry if it came across that way
Oct 28, 2009. 6:54 AMArduinoFun says:
This is by far the coolest Arduino project. I really hope you win the Grand Prize!
Oct 27, 2009. 2:20 PMmacattackct says:
 NOOOO.  Ive been working on something like this for over a month and was about to submit it to the arduino contest.  Its different, but too similar

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