Video: It can’t be that hard to make a robot guitar…?

A story of how I decided to build a robot guitar without knowing anything about hardware.

A big thank you to Elio Fistarol who built most of the hardware and taught me how everything works so that I could make the rest.

I wrote about the autoguitar project last year here. Around that time, I got frustrated by the project and shelved it for around half a year. Hardware is hard (haha). In December, I finally mustered the energy to start wrapping things up and made the guitar reliable enough to record a demo (see 16:38 in the video).

I’m happy that I managed to get the video out after so long, but it is really frustrating how slowly things move in hardware projects and how your progress can be instantly erased by a wire melting, a string snapping, or a motor controller that suddenly stops working.

I’d be interested in making an improved version of the guitar eventually, but I’d need someone to take care of the hardware for me. I learned a lot by connecting the various pieces together under Elio’s guidance, but if the goal is to make something that works reliably, I’d rather leave it to the experts directly :)