Bass Bot
In spring of 2019, Zach Silliman, Kenneth Huaman, and I were taking a graduate level course ECE 5725 : Design with Embedded Operating System, which is one of my favorite course taken at Cornell. We had learned to use Raspberry Pi 3 to do fun things like making a simple boucing ball game in PiTFT and controlling a mobile robot. In the last five-six week of the class, we finsihed the course with an open-ended final project. The three of us needed to come up with a good one to finish our Cornell adventure. One night, Zach, who was mad excited about project about music, suddently came up with the idea of making a auto-tuning device for his bass guitar. After doing some research online and consulting with Prof. Skovira, such a tuning device already existed and Prof.Skovira suggested: "how about a system that can play the bass guitar". BANG! Our mind suddently came together and a blueprint for such a system immediately followed: we could use servo motors to pluck the strings and use a linear rail with a solenoid to clamp the threads at different locaitons.
Since the three of us all have non-overlapping speciality, we divided our work into three parts: software (Zach), elecronics (Ken), and mechanical (Canhui). I was responsed for all the mechaical components, including designing & 3D printing the pluck assembly and rail assembly and system integration.