While browsing through Cigar Box Guitar groups on Facebook, I kept coming across this post about a NES that had been turned into a 6 string guitar. I thought it was the coolest idea, and decided I wanted to make one. But then I thought…this has already been done. What else can I do with it? I had also been thinking about making an instrument with an Arduino, and bam! an idea was born. What if I created an instrument that looked like a guitar, with the NES as the body, but made the sounds with an Arduino?
From my dabbling with this microcontroller I knew that I could produce simple tones, which are the types of tones that the most primitive 8-bit arcade games from the 80’s sounded like. I also thought I could use a soft potentiometer along the neck of this instrument to represent the notes. But how would I strum the instrument? I chose to add an arcade button to toggle the sound on and off when pressed. While I was at it, I added two other buttons to raise and lower the octave. Finally I added one last button to alternate between fretted mode and slide mode. When in fretted mode, there are discreet parts of the neck that make certain notes, like a fretted guitar. If you run your finger up and down the neck in this mode you get only the notes on a typical guitar. Switching to slide mode changes it so that you get all the notes and everything in between, like if you were playing a guitar with a slide. I wired the Arduino to the NES power button so it can be turned on and off.
This was a fun build that was a bit of a departure for me. I got to flex my coding muscles a bit, which I hadn’t done in some time.
The finished product Headstock made from the circuit board Fret markers on the side of the neck Laying out the components Soldering the components Testing the soft potentiometer
