Completed Midterm Project

After using Jun as a guinea pig, she gave us some great suggestions as to how to make our controls more user friendly including her suggestion that we use a foot pedal for our play/stop button to mimic playing a piano. Luckily, I had a foot pedal from a drum set. After making the adjustments, this is what we got:


Complete circuit 

To make the foot pedal a switch was a bit tricky since basically the whole pedal is conductive. With some strategically placed electrical tape, I was able to make a pretty fancy switch.


Play/Stop foot pedal 

Here is a close-up of our breadboard.


Breadboard  

We enclosed the photocell to give us the ability to limit the amount of light that was received on the cell which controls the tone that is played. Using a metallic box further helped us get a wider range of values.


Tone photocell in sliding case 

My three button switch was reduced to one button. One of the buttons function was redundant so it was removed and the other one was replaced by the foot pedal. For those interested, the funky shaped speaker was taken from a G3.


Note duration/frequency switch and Speaker 

Video to be posted. In the meantime, here are some photos of Lazlo demonstrating how the instrument is played.


Lazlo playing instrument (Pic 1) 


Lazlo playing instrument (Pic 2)