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Today was dedicated to getting a working prototype of the guitar in its nearly final form. Since we have redesigned the control board, we modified the original design by cutting connections and jumpering pins to get it working with the programming. This is only temporary for testing purposes. All of the guitar connections were soldered so that so we could test…it’s still a mess right now, but that’s because we don’t want to cut the wires down until everything is completely finalized. The track that the sensors will mount on should be done tomorrow, we just need to get some clear adhesive for the plexiglass.

Following are some pictures from today:

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Since we are convinced that the inside our our guitar is going to look really cool when complete, we’ve decided to make a a back window out of plexiglass, so today we’ve started to cut it.

As normal, today was also another day of program tweaking, something that will likely take a while longer at the current pace.

Since we now have the PCBs in our possession, we have also begun running tests with them.  The sensors work perfectly, and though we will be getting different control boards, we are modifying the current ones to work as the future ones will (by jumpering connections, and cutting leads).

Here are some pictures from today:

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At this point, it’s all about bug fixes. We have two working version of our program, the spin version, running in a slower interpreted language that is easier to code, and a super fast-assembly version, that still doesn’t work perfectly, but can process 20x faster than its spin cousin. We’re trying to add new, smarter filters as well, but we’ve found that these are easier to code in spin first, and then we can move them over to assembly afterwards.

We also came to the realization today that we don’t have an intense name for our bot! So if anybody can think of a cool name, please let me know!

I started doing some test circuits on the PCBs today as well. The sensor boards work perfectly, but we will have to remake the controller boards to coincide with our new programming. In the mean time I am testing the current control boards with our old programming to ensure that the rest of their wiring is correct.

Lastly, we finally got our mini-B to B usb extension cable today. The mini-B end will plug into a processor inside the guitar, and I cut an opening in the side of the guitar for the USB-B connection. This will allow us to make programming changes to the chip without even opening the guitar, once everything is done.

Here’s some pictures from today:

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Oh yes, even more programming today. After spending hours working out little bugs in our new code platform, we finally have a “working” version. However, it is still not as good as our previous program (the one that 100 percented a song). However, it can process significantly faster, and once we figure out how to harness that correctly, we will have some very powerful code. Not only that, but it makes more efficient use of our 8 core chip. Where our previous code used a core for each colored button, we now parallel process all the buttons in one cog, leaving the other cogs open for USB debugging, and hopefully some other things in the future (I’ll leave those as a surprise). Dr. Neil Singer, our supervisor, has been a big help with debugging and optimizing our coding.

We also got our new PCBs today, which we can now start soldering and testing. They should clean up our setup quite a bit. We are working on a stand for the monitor that will hold the sensor boards in place, while allowing for them to adjust horizontally.

Here are some pics to enjoy:

Work on the guitar has been continuing at a steady rate. What has been going on:

• We’ve installed the d-sub connection into the side of the guitar
• We’ve installed a switch above the whammy bar that will turn autonomous mode on or off
• We’re still working on trying to mold the buttons so we can create some transparent replacements with LEDs inside
• Code tweaking. We’re really close to fixing the issue where star power notes tend to not get strummed
• More code tweaking. The level of software post-processing has gotten so heavy that we are moving some of the code from an interpreted language to assembly code in order to speed it up
• We’ve finally finished the computer design of the circuit boards, and we sent them out to get printed professionally today. We should be able to start soldering on the components by early next week when we get the boards.

Here are some pics of all the stuff I’m talking about :)