Digital Chord Chart

A detailed walk-through of this project is in my instructable page.

This is a project I made by myself to start learning about microcontrollers. Since I knew how to play guitar and always wanted to teach others, I decided to make a guitar that teaches others itself. Plus, I got to play around with LEDs and got to learn about and implement an LED matrix. The Digital Chord Chart is named such since it tries to imitate a chord chart which are diagrams that visually try to show players how to play chords or scales on a guitar by pointing out literally where to put the fingers. This also helped me in making the project relatively compact: chord charts only use a maximum of around 5 frets to display information since the notes on a guitar repeat in a similar pattern. This worked out well as I didn't want to 3D print an entire guitar neck. I would only have to print upto 5 frets which is around a quarter of the actual neck. Note the 3D print is actually life-size, i.e. if you put your guitar next to it, the frets would be about the same size. This was helpful since this is meant to be a teaching tool and it would improve clarity.

The red LEDs that guide the user use the idea of multiplexing (turning on one LED at a time at very high speeds) to display clearly the chord/scale. There is also an LCD screen that can further guide the user with the aid of a remote control. I designed the entire LCD menu system from scratch and had to program it to respond to the IR remote appropriately. Everything was controlled with the Arduino UNO and this was my first project using a microcontroller. As a result, I learned a great deal.

Lastly, it has been featured in a handful of online articles including Atmel Corporation (makers of MCU chips that are used in Arduinos)! The ones I found are listed as follows.

Click on the images to see them in a full view.