Inspiration
As someone who plays string instruments, I have always been afraid of getting to a stage in life when I will no longer be able to play my favorite instruments due to medical conditions that come with old age. That's when I came up with the idea for UkeHan!
What it does
It uses 4 ultrasonic sensors and plays a note depending on the distance of your fingers from the sensor. It is very easy to use and requires minimal movement, which is helpful to people with medical conditions like arthritis.
How we built it
Used bread boards and jumper wires, to connect the Arduino to HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensors and passive buzzers. There is also a touch sensor to turn it off when you're done !
Challenges we ran into
Sensitivity of the sensors gave off wrong readings which played the wrong notes, which had to be fixed by isolating the sensors. The original plan was to get the exact note tone of a ukulele to play through the buzzers, but I only found out later that I couldn't play a .wav file through a passive buzzer. I even tried using a capacitor and resistor and tried to connect it to a SONY speaker, which just like the buzzers, turned out to be passive. So I went ahead and completed the project with the default passive buzzer tones, by adjusting the frequency for each note.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Created my first Arduino project. I'm glad I stayed up all night instead of just giving up when I realized that my project wouldn't go as planned.
What we learned
How to use an Arduino board and its connections and how to send a music file to output on a buzzer, but most importantly, how to adapt to a situation when it feels like the universe is plotting against you :0
What's next for UkeHan
The plan is to purchase active buzzers and getting the project to work as originally planned. Next, I plan on adding an LCD screen to the current UkeHan prototype to display instructions for users to get adjusted to playing it
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