Electric Guitar Shocks You For Missing A Note

Rocksmith is a popular video game that works like Guitar Hero, but with a real guitar. You have to play well and hit the right notes, or the game penalizes your score. [Lightwing] took the stakes up a notch, though, adding a system that shocks the player every time they fail.

To achieve this, it was necessary to detect when the player missed a note. Initial attempts involved using Tensor Flow AI to detect the game state from the screen, but it was unreliable. Instead, the game’s memory was read to achieve detection. When the player misses a note, a certain section of memory changes, and a script reads the change in game state. It then sends a signal to an Arduino which triggers the stun gun’s fire button, which shocks the player holding the guitar.

As you might expect, the documentation for this project includes a video which involves plenty of gratuitous electric shocks when [Lightwing] makes mistakes. Fair warning — there’s plenty of colorful language when the stun gun fires. Generally, a powerful shock ends with screams a dropped guitar, and too much fear to continue.

It’s painful enough that it’s probably not a useful teaching tool for learning the guitar. We’ve seen similar shocking builds before, too, like this simple wire game.

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Guitar Hero Robot Actually Shreds

Once a popular craze, most of the public has sold or stashed away their plastic video game instruments and forgotten the likes of Guitar Hero and Rockband. Having never been quite satisfied with his scores, [Nick O’Hara] set out to create a robot that could play a Guitar Hero controller. It would be easy enough to use transistors to actuate the buttons or even just a Teensy to emulate a controller and have it play the perfect game, but [Nick] wanted to replicate what it was really like to play. So after burning out a fair number of solenoids (driving them over spec) and learning on his feet, [Nick] slowly began to dial in his robot, Jon Bot Jovi.

The brains of the bot are a Raspberry Pi running some OpenCV-based code that identifies blobs of different colors. The video feed comes from a PS2 via an HDMI capture card. Solenoids are driven via an 8 channel driver board, controlled by the Pi. While it missed a few notes here and there, we loved seeing the strumming solenoid whammy rapidly on the strummer. All in all, it’s a great project, and we love the design of the robot. Whether played by a robot, turned into a synthesizer, or recreated from toy pianos and mechanical keyboards, Guitar Hero controllers offer many hacking opportunities.

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Guitar Hero Controller Gets A New Musical Life

Guitar Hero was a big deal, right up until it wasn’t. The best efforts of the video game industry couldn’t resurrect the once-off rush of enthusiasm for rhythm gaming, and thrift stores around the globe are now littered with little plastic instruments. [Analog Sketchbook] decided to give one of these guitars for the Wii a new life, repurposing it as a synth controller.

The build is a straightforward one, thanks to the prevalence of modern maker solutions to electronic problems. Hooking up to the guitar is a solved problem, with an Adafruit Nunchucky breakout board allowing the Guitar Hero controller to be connected via jumper wires to the Raspberry Pi’s IO pins.

Communication is via I2C, and is easy to work with in Pure Data, running on the Pi. [Analog Sketchbook] created a patch that runs a synthesizer, controlled by the buttons and controls on the guitar itself. With this setup, you could create any number of different routines to allow the guitar to be played differently. We’d love to see a chiptune-esque arpeggio patch, or something that plays fat FM synth tones a la the Genesis, but that’s just our opinion. The sky really is the limit here, with plenty of grunt on the Pi for various forms of synthesis.

It’s a fun build that gives new life to an otherwise forgotten gaming accessory. We’ve seen them repurposed before too, as far back as 2010. Video after the break.

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Guitar Game Plays With Enhanced Realism

There’s a lot more to learning how to play the guitar than just playing the right notes at the right time and in the right order. To produce any sound at all requires learning how to do completely different things with your hands simultaneously, unless maybe you’re a direct descendant of Eddie Van Halen and thus born to do hammer ons. There’s a bunch of other stuff that comes with the territory, like stringing the thing, tuning it, and storing it properly, all of which can be frustrating and discouraging to new players. Add in the calluses, and it’s no wonder people like Guitar Hero so much.

[Jake] and [Jonah] have found a way to bridge the gap between pushing candy colored buttons and developing fireproof calluses and enough grip strength to crush a tin can. For their final project in [Bruce Land]’s embedded microcontroller design class, they made a guitar video game and a controller that’s much closer to the experience of actually playing a guitar. Whether you’re learning to play for real or just want to have fun, the game is a good introduction to the coordination required to make more than just noise.

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Reverse Engineering Guitar Hero

What do you do when a ten-year-old video game has a bug in it? If you are [ExileLord] you fix it, even if you don’t have the source code. Want to know how? Luckily, he produced a video showing all the details of how he tracked the bug down and fixed it. You can see the video below. You may or may not care about Guitar Hero, but the exercise of reverse engineering and patching the game is a great example of the tools and logic required to reverse engineer any binary software, especially a Windows binary.

The tool of choice is IDA, an interactive debugger and disassembler. The crash thows an exception and since [ExileLord] has done some work on the game before, he was able to find a function that was creating a screen element that eventually led to the crash.

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Forgotten Rock Band Drum Controller As A MIDI Instrument

Happen to have an old Rock Band drum controller collecting dust in your living room? If you also have a spare Arduino and don’t mind parting with that plastic college memento then you’ve got the bulk of what could potentially be your new percussive MIDI instrument. In his project video [Evan Kale] outlines the steps necessary to turn that unloved plastic into a capable instrument for recording.

The whole process as outlined by [Evan] in under seven minutes. This looks like a great weekend endeavor for those of us just starting out with MIDI. After cracking the back of the Guitar Hero drum kit controller open, the main board within is easily replaced with a standard sized Ardunio (which matches the present mounting holes exactly). About 4:50 into the video [Evan] explains how to add a basic perf-board shield over the Arduino which connects the piezo sensors in each of the drum pads to the analog pins of the micro-controller. The MIDI jack that comes built into the back of the kit can also be reused as MIDI out when wired to the Arduino’s serial out pin. By adjusting [Evan’s] example code you can dial in the instrument’s feedback to match the intensity of each hit.

The video with all of the details is after the jump. Or you can check out a MIDI hack that goes the other way and uses a drum kit as a Guitar Hero or Rock Band controller instead

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Pan Flute Hero

panflutehero

The latest creation in the never-ending collection of “____ Hero” instruments is this Raspi-infused pan flute, built by [Sven Andersson] and his team at the 2013 WOW Hackathon. The flute itself consists of varying lengths of bamboo from a local flower shop, cut short enough to be hand-held while still hiding the Pi from the front side. In the spirit of other ‘Hero’ instruments, the pan flute has no real musical functionality. Each pipe houses what appears to be an electret microphone breakout board, which they kept in place by sealing off the end of the pipe with glue.

The sensors connect to the GPIO connector on the Raspi, which communicates to a local TCP/IP server the team ran as a controller hub. The game is also their original creation, written entirely in LUA. They turned to Spotify to find suitable material for the player to experience, creating playlists with actual pan flute songs and using the libspotify SDK to access the music. You can see the end result of the project in a short demo video below.

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