Molly Farison
molly.farison@gmail.com
  • Work Experience
    • Resume
    • Lilypad work details
    • Altaeros work details
    • NASA work details
  • Technical Projects
    • Lilypad Scale
    • Concussion Detector
    • Microgrid Research
    • Connected Bicycle
    • FPGA Music Visualizer
    • Sonar System
    • Project Wizard Software Tool
    • Automated Guitar Tuner
  • Design Projects
    • Lilypad Scale Design
    • Designing New Tools for Lung Cancer
    • Designing for Parents and Educators of Visually Impaired Children
    • Redesigning Ironing for Sustainability
  • Portfolio Summary
  • Environmental Activism
  • Engineering Education

Designing an Automated Guitar Tuner: An Exercise in Control Theory

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What?
Using knowledge of control theory, a partner and I attempted to build an automated guitar tuner. This turned into a study of phase-locked loops, which we proved were not a possible solution to the automated guitar tuner problem.
Why?
An automated guitar tuner is useful because many amateur guitar players do not have a good sense of pitch and take several minutes to tune before playing. An automated guitar tuner would tune the guitar in seconds.
How?
Rather than using a microphone and a digital control system, which we supposed would be too imprecise, we decided to try to use a phase-locked loop in analog circuitry to control our system. Unfortunately, the need for filters and an automatic gain control circuit (since a guitar sound fades quickly) make the system impossible to control with this architecture, as our final paper explains.

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