It started nearly thirty years ago, when Ben Reardon encountered a robot playing a classical guitar at the 1988 World Expo in his hometown of Brisbane, Australia. He was only a teenager at the time, but he knew right then what he had to do.
Twenty seven years later, enter Reardon’s robotic player guitar, a pretty awesome little musical bot if I’ve ever seen one. It features both an Arduino and a Raspberry Pi, along with an RC servo for each string. Add 460-odd lines of code — Python, a bit of Bash, and processing sketches for the Arduino, and you have what Reardon describes as the world’s first “Network Time Protocol accurate, Internet of Things connected, Big Ben chiming grandfather clock, firewall log playing, door chiming, guitar playing robot.” Uh, let’s just stick with player guitar.
You can read all about Reardon’s making process, and download all of his code, over on his website. Or if you’re feeling slightly less ambitious this Sunday afternoon, you can just listen as the bot’s mechanically-actuated picks strum a few soothing notes. [Hackaday]
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