Team members:
- Rick Denney
- Dan Forrester
- Lucas Gilbride
- Randall Hood
This capstone project will actually be a proof of concept for a player guitar. We plan to build a mechanical device that will play songs on a guitar. Due to financial and time limitations, the guitar player will only use the last four frets on the guitar to play the melodies (which will somewhat restrict the song selections).
The player guitar will have two main mechanical features. First, the "fingers" near the base of the guitar will pluck the strings using small mounted motors. On the neck of the guitar, solenoids will be used to press down the strings in order to play the desired note.
Ideally, we will be able to download midi files from the internet, encode the files into information that the device will understand, and then play the song on the guitar. As noted before, this project is only a proof of the concept that we could design a complete player guitar given the necessary time and money. We believe a device like this would be highly marketable and fun to watch and listen to.