0:00:11.600,0:00:16.943 This is Bob and he will talk about ArduinoGuitar 0:00:16.943,0:00:20.580 It is his project and it's about a guitar 0:00:20.580,0:00:22.940 that has no other controls than its strings. 0:00:22.940,0:00:22.940 And I think it's a quite interesting project. 0:00:22.940,0:00:22.940 Thank you. 0:00:22.940,0:00:29.540 Thank you. 0:00:33.646,0:00:34.844 Can everyone hear me. 0:00:35.460,0:00:39.140 So, I will talk about the project itself 0:00:39.140,0:00:41.980 and everything that came before the project 0:00:41.980,0:00:45.660 because I didn't know much about any of this stuff 0:00:45.660,0:00:48.540 when I started playing with it, so I will tell you a little bit 0:00:48.540,0:00:53.940 about myself and how this whole thing happened. 0:00:53.940,0:00:57.740 There's a lot of things that I might mention, that you might not know about, but you can use Google, right. 0:00:57.740,0:00:59.940 Everyone can use Google. 0:00:59.940,0:01:02.380 Alright, so, there's two things that you might wanna know about me. 0:01:02.380,0:01:04.380 There are two things that are really characterize me. 0:01:04.380,0:01:07.540 I have a lot of dreams. I spend a lot of time just sitting around and dreaming. 0:01:07.540,0:01:11.304 And I used to have very little money all my life, you know. 0:01:11.304,0:01:12.940 Practically no money. 0:01:12.940,0:01:16.620 So with dreams and no money you learn to scrounge. You really, you learn to scrounge. 0:01:16.620,0:01:19.260 And when you find something you learn to fix it. 0:01:19.260,0:01:24.383 And when you fixed it you don't want it to break anymore. You got attached to things you got. 0:01:24.383,0:01:30.220 That's me. You develop an ability to fix anything, which I think I have today. 0:01:30.220,0:01:35.100 Practically anything if I really want. But on the other hand once I fixed it I get attached to it and I don't wanna it to break. 0:01:35.100,0:01:37.780 So this fear of losing it. 0:01:37.780,0:01:44.260 You know, poverty, dreams and stuff becomes sort of a mixed blessing when you have this. 0:01:44.260,0:01:46.980 You have stuff and then you're afraid to lose it. A song says 0:01:46.980,0:01:48.900 'When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose' 0:01:48.900,0:01:52.820 But it's not really true. It's when you got nothing you can not afford to lose anything. 0:01:52.820,0:01:56.139 That's really how I looked,lived most of my life. 0:01:56.139,0:01:58.420 And there's another aspect that I'm very tenacious. 0:01:58.420,0:02:02.420 So I have this sort of never give up attitude. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 That's also a mixed blessing in a lot of ways. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And one last thing about me. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 I usually like stuff that nobody else likes. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 I mean, I'm the only one who buys the one little thing in the shop that has been there on the shelf 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 for hundred years and nobody wants it because they don't know what it's for. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Because they just don't like it. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So, this whole project started. Does this work. I guess not. How do you change slides. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 There we go. Electric guitar. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So this whole project started. I was as a kid I always been a hippie. I'm still a hippie. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Living in the sixties and all that. Play electric guitar, want to play the guitar, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 couldn't play the electric guitar, couldn't afford an electric guitar. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Get a lot of junk electric guitars, have to fix them. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Don't know how to fix them. Anyways, I had this idea about electric guitars. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And so first what is an electric guitar really. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 It's got these things in the middle here. This is one of my guitars. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 It's a guitar that propably no one's every seen before. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 There's only two of them in Belgium. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 It's made in Canada. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 This one has two, they call them 'pickups' 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 That's where it captures the vibrations of the strings to turn it into an electrical signal. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And then here you have a switch which basically which roots the signal from the pickups to the volume and tone controls 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 which are here on this guitar. This has one volume and one tone. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And then it all goes out through the jack to the amplifier. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 It's pretty simple. I mean it seems pretty simple. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Although it took me a long time to understand. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So that's what a guitar is. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Now here is what I know about electronics. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 That's it. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 You're laughing. You're laughing, but I didn't find it very funny. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 I spent a lot of time, even that, it seems so simple and it is simple, but it took me a long time to understand things like 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 a voltage divider. What is this? 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 I'm still not sure if I really understand. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Anyways, so that was way I was for like thirty years of my life. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 I had guitars. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 They never worked. And I got a job, a real job, a serious job. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And I had some money. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And so I decided to learn to play the guitar at last. I'm an old man now. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Old hippie. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So I got a serious guitar. And a serious guitar requires serious adjustment. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 You know I can fix anything. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Things that break. Things that are expensive. You don't wanna just tweak with. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So I brought it to a luthier, a guitar shop. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Luthier is a fancy word for guitar maker. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And these guys adjusted the guitar and I learned a lot from these guys about guitars, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 about technology. And I learned that basically everybody wants the same thing that Jimmy Hendrix played 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 That's all there is. The whole music industry is based on Jimmy Hendrix played a left handed stratocaster 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Not everybody is left-handed, but everybody wants a stratocaster. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So, that's it. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 That's the number one selling guitar. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And that's it. The technology hasn't changed. 1950s. They invented all the stuff 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and it hasn't changed. And nobody wants it to change 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 because everybody wants to be Jimmy Hendrix. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And the mechanical potentiometer and the capacitor and a little mechanical switch. That's it. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 That was from the 1950s and it hasn't changed. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And even now a guitar is in five figure-prices, I'm saying a twenty thousand or a thirty thousand 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 dollar guitar. It's still the same guts inside. Nothing special. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Ok, maybe the pickups are little bit more sophisticated. Maybe the wiring is really poorly put together. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 There are twenty thousand dollar guitars that looks like they were soldered by a child. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And I've seen it. I wouldn't believe it because on one point I was thinking about buying one of those 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 at a special price but when I saw the guts I was like 'Forget it, forget it!'. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So, you know the 60s. I love the 60s, because of hippies and because of peace and love 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and all that kind of stuff. It was great and I, for long time I regret it, but then came along Internet 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and the 21st century and I found the 21st century is not too bad either. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And in fact it's really cool, especially the long tail. Living on the long tail is a cool place to live. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And everybody here, we are all on the long tail whether we know it or not. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So, talking to these guys and I started thinking why has the guitar has to be so old fashioned. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Why can't it be in 21st century, you know. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Why does it have to have these mechanical things and you know there is all kinds of stuff. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 For example the guitar I showed you. It does some cool stuff. It's not just an ordinary guitar. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 It does some pretty cool stuff. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So, basically you have you know the two pickups you have either one or the other or both. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So, both in parallel, both in series. Series is already an advance, I mean this only something that became 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 imagined later, much later. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 But this guitar has all of that. And those are very, very sophisticated pickups, which were only invented I guess 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 ten, twelve years ago. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 They are very sophisticated. It's a very sophisticated guitar. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 But it offers both the neck, the bridge, the neck is the top one, the bridge is the bottom one, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 so you can have the neck, you can have the bridge, you can have the neck and the bridge is series 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 the neck and bridge in parallel. So that's already pretty sophisticated for a musician. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 It's already incomprehensible for most musicians. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 My guitar teacher when I tell him he says 'What do you mean, what are you talking about?' 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 See, well, I was just saying 'Jazz and Rock' - 'Oh, I get it, I get it...' 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So, but even that, so what does that mean? That means, you have this little switch has four positions. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 There is one for each thing. And if you want to start turning things on, turning things off. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Everything you need the mechanical switch and you want to have individual tone controls, individual volume controls. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Everything means more mechanical stuff. And pretty soon you have your guitar just covered with buttons. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And nobody knows how it works. Even yourself. Even if you built it yourself. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 You still can't rememeber which button to push to get this sound. It becomes just a mess. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So, I thought, my vision was lets get rid of all this electromechanical crap and put a screen on it or 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 make it have a curcuit in there and have it a screen where you can have it synthetic and you can do all kinds of stuff. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So, why not, why can't that be. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So that was my vision. It was to have some kind of curcuit on an Android phone an Bluetooth and in there 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 In there could some kind of thing, I don't know what, an Adruino it turned out to be. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 That was my idea and it seemed easy enough. Modern technology and and all that stuff. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 [Vehicles, IR], it's good enough. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And why didn't it already exist? Well, I have a lot of friends or friends of friends in the music industry. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And they all came up with the same answers. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 They is two reasons. First of all it's just unbelievably complicated. You need a team of engineers. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Hundreds of years of development and it's just really complicated. And this was from professionals, from 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 engineers in the music industry. This is not just from musicians. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And then the other thing was just nobody wants it. It's just ridiculous. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Everybody wants to have a knob and a switch. That's what musicians want. That's it. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 That's all there is. So just don't waste your time. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 I didn't really waste a lot of my time, but I kept thinking about it. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And since I didn't know anything about electronics it was kind of a handicap. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 You know, what to do about this and how to make progress. So this idea just bang around in my head for a while. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And then nothing happened. And then I used to go to a lot of TED conf, I still do go to TED conferences in Brussels, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 I live in Brussels and they got the TEDx there. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And you get a lot of inspirational guys talking and I went to one of these. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 I had a good time with that and I was thinking, you know, is it really impossible to make this? 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Or is it just people are scared of it? Let me think about Marshall McLuhan. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Does anybody know here who Marshall McLuhan is? One person? That's it? Two? Three? Four? Five? 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Marshall McLuhan was a great thinker, he thought about mass media in the early 50s/60s and he 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 predicted Internet in 1962. He predicted the arrival of Internet will be a great thing. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 He said 'In this new age the human kind will move from individualism and fragmentation to a collective 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 identity. A global village.' So invented the phrase 'global village'. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 But he wasn't thinking about computers. He was thinking about the electrical network that ran 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 throughout the world. He tought that was going to bring the entire planet together like electricity and the net, the electrical net. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 He was a cool guy. And he also thought about a lot of cool things like why inovation is so hard? 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And he said this second part, which is really [a proporto] to my project and probably to a lot of 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 things people do here is that 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Whenever you look at something new all you references are in the past, so look at something new you just think 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 'Well, is it like this or is it like that?' 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So, a Mac is like Windows, right? 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Macintosh is like Windows? 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Everything is referring to the immediate past so that makes it hard to understand something that is 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 radically new. And it puts people off in general from things that are radically new. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So, I was thinking all this people have told me that nobody wants this stuff and it's impossible to do. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Is that just fear and misunderstanding or is there more to it? 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 But I had no way of knowing what that meant what was going to happen. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 I always think of this story, the Henry Ford story. Which is, he was interviewed. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 I don't think this has acutally happened, but he was interviewed and was asked 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 'How did you know people would like your car? Did you go and ask them before? Use your survey?' 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And he said 'If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.' And, you know, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 he wasn't interested in making faster horses. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So, all this things were going on in my mind and then I went to last years TEDx in Brussels and Mitch Altman was speaking there. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Is Mitch by any chance in the room? No, well, he was there and he gave a very inspiring speach about 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 hackerspaces and all that kind of stuff. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So, I nearly jumped on him because he's an electronics guy and I said 'Here's my project.' 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 'What do you think?' - 'Of course, of course, it's so easy. Of course, you could do it. It's a great idea.' 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 'Go and do it!' 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 That was enough, one guy. Never seen before in my life, convinced me that I should do it. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Fine. All these experts told me 'Forget it, forget it, forget it.' 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And so, it's a shame he's not in the room, but he gets a slide. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So that's you know, he hook me. He said contact the hackerspace community. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 I didn't even know there was one in Brussels. I mean, 'Brussels'. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Anyway, there's a huge hackerspace community in Belgium and Brussels and I was amazed about this. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So that's the meta part of the project. Thank you. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Now we can talk about the technology and the stuff which is maybe interesting maybe not. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So, that's a potentiometer, right? 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Most people know what it is. You got the thing you turn and it moves the wiper, the 'W' up or down. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And means that means, that one resistance gets bigger and one get smaller, right? 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 It's really simple. So, then we are having an analogue signal, a sinusoid, coming from the pickups. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 The question was how could you make that controllable digitally, somehow. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 I thought about putting servos, motors all kind of stupid things. I had lot of stupid ideas. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 But I put this out on a hackerspace mailing list and people had all kinds of answers, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 but it all seemed to be like they were, it wasn't criticism, but they didn't know what I wanted. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And I felt like there was real some kind of, you know, did you see 'Cool Hand Luke'? 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 'What we got here is failure to communicate.' And then they whack him over the head. Great movie. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Paul Newmans masterpiece. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Anyway, it was a failure to communicate and that is something I learnt a lot in this project. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 You ask questions and they make perfect sense to you, but nobody else can understand what you are 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 talking about. You ask a question in a forum, you say 'I got this thing and this thing.' 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And people don't answer or they ask you with crazy things. And you realize, that they don't understand. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And they did not understand. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So, finally though after a lot of questions being tenacious, you remember tenacity, we got to an 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 answer by Johannes Tallman who's a brilliant scientist. Is he not here either? 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Well, he's in the [?] space. And he just said 'Why don't you do it with a LED LDR?' 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 I didn't know if that was a word or if that was acronyms. I said 'Ok, great. Tell me more about was that is.' 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So, actually a LED LDR is really a LED, a light, and a light depended resistor. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So you have something that shines light and then you have something that changes resistance when you shine light on it. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 And you put those two together and that makes a digitally controllable resistance. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Because you can shine light more or less. You can pulse it with PWM. So now you have a 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 digitally controllable resistance. And if you put two of them together like in a picture you get something very 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 similar to a potentiometer. And all you have to do is manage the current. And in the mean time I've been 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 playing with, I got get inside with Arduino, I saw Banzi on TED and I got the book and I bought an Arduino 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 and I could make the lights blink and it was great, everything was great. All the problems were solved. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 It seems so simple. Cause like. 'What's wrong with you people? This is so easy. This is so unbelivably easy.' 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So, I started doing it, but somebody on the mailing list said 'You know', I quote this 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 'You certainly worked to some extend and even if the result is to noisy or bad quality to be used in music 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 it will still be huge fun to make.' And I thought to myself 'What? Noisy? Where is noise coming from?' 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 'How can? Vehicles IR! Where is noise in that equation? I don't get it.' 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 But that was kind of staying in the back of my mind, you know, who cares? 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Went on. By the way, LED LDR is, actually in the industry they're called 'Vactrols'. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 There is actual a component, that has the whole thing build in one and they are made by different companys. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 The best company is Perkin Elmer. If you buy them just put my name in the [?] I get them on my commission, ok. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So, that was easy. So now I had the fundamental problems solved and I just had to learn how to do it, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 I read 'Making things talk' by Tom Igoe, later corresponded with and found out he didn't test 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 all the code in his book. So here it is. So the idea was really you have a guitar, an Arduino in there, 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 a bunch of vactrols and then you have some kind of Bluetooth and some kind of device, a computer or 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Android. I've never seen an Android phone in my life at the time, but I figured that would do it and it will be really easy. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Yeah and it was. So here is the really geeky part. This the schematic. I only made it because the person 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 revising my presentation here told me to make it more technical because this is a technical conference. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Alright, so here is the technical stuff. You wanted it, you get it. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 In the upper left, there, you can barely see it, but there is three, I put three pickups, this guitar has 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 three pickups and you see there is one sort of double pickup, which is exactly what it is. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So this three pickups. They come in. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 So the top one goes in and you have the red wire goes to a vectoral(?), which is just an on and off vectoral(?). 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 It's got no variable resistance just shine all maximum light and it let's maximum electricity through. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 It's not perfect. The vectors(?) I use have about 80 Ohm resistance when they are full on. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 But you can do a little better than that. I didn't buy the right vectors. I couldn't understand the datasheets. 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 It's so complicated. Why don't they just say what I want? 9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000 Anyways.. So there you have it. Each of the pickups goes into a vector(?) Those top four