TEAR | Devpost

Inspiration

Team TEAR is very passionate about assisting those with disabilities, which is what motivated our project. Growing up with a paralyzed family member who loves music and loved to play the guitar, one of the members of team TEAR suggested designing a voice activated guitar. A voice activated guitar would allow those with similar passions to be able to continue enjoy them regardless of the challenge(s) they face as a result of their disability.

What it does

Our voice-activated guitar allows a user to create an oral input command by stating which note on the guitar they would like played. The two robotic components then work in tandem to both strum and press down on a fret in order to play the desired note.

How we built it

There are three main parts of the guitar: the voice-activated sensors and its program, the robotic component that presses down on the desired fret, and finally the robotic component that strums the guitar. These robotics components were primarily Arduino-based and worked based on the code that was written for them in Arduino-C code.

Challenges we ran into

A major challenge that our team ran into is designing structural components and faulty circuit components. Structural components included the clamps used to fasten the motor that strums the guitar string and the "bridge" that the fret pressing motor uses to traverse the length of the guitar. A large struggle with the clamps was being able to hot glue them in a way that allowed them to properly fasten, while not touching any of the guitar strings such that they can be plucked. The circuits components mostly included motors. The motors that were being used gave us several issues as they either did not work at all, or the soldering holding the wires that allows their connection to other Arduino components would break frequently.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team is very proud of our final product; a functioning voice-activated guitar. Having members work around the clock in order to make this product, we believe that being able to successfully create the voice-activated guitar is a reflection both of our tenacity as engineers and our passions as philantrophists and advocates for those with disabilities.

What we learned

We learned that good organization is what makes innovation possible. Given the tight time constraints (i.e only 24 hours) of a project as such, oftentimes it felt as if it was impossible to fully construct the voice-activated guitar. However with the proper time management, and distribution of our group members into the domains in which they excel, we were able to finish the project within the given deadline.

What's next for TEAR

TEAR would love to expand this project by making robotic components that are able to play more than one guitar string. We believe that this can be made possible by expanding the degrees of freedom that the robotic components move in. As of right now, parts of the voice-activated guitar such as the robotic component that presses down on the frets moves only vertically. In order to play more than one guitar string, this robotic component can be given wheels that move it horizontally, in order to access more frets.