Musical Instruments
Model: GLE-1
Serial: #1
Top Material: Sitka Spruce
Fingerboard & Bridge: Rosewood
Body & Neck: Baltic Birch Plywood
This is a 15" scale length Guilele (soprano guitar) with strings tuned in standard guitar tuning (EADGBE). The sides are cut into a living hinge pattern with a laser cutter, and joined to the top and bottom with finger joints.
My first acoustic instrument was this Appalachian dulcimer. I have since started using various digital fabrication technologies (laser cutting, 3D printing, and CNC milling) to design and build musical instruments. Check out this Instructables I made for building a pineapple style ukulele.
IMG_1152.MOVI made a series of solid-bodied ukuleles with a CNC router. Many of them had the tuning pegs at the bottom of the instrument to make them as compact as possible. The frets were either put in by cutting slots with a flat end mill the diameter of the fret wire, or by cutting slots with a ball end mill the same diameter of steel wire. In the latter case, each fret going up the neck was cut deeper than the last to ensure all frets worked without buzzing with a low action.
One cool project that I have made using this instrument design is called the Cloud-ulele. I made the instrument with the same general methodology, but then added an amplifier circuit to get the signal into a National Instruments myRIO. Using LabVIEW, I was able to get the myRIO to process the fundamental frequency of the note I was playing, send that note up to the cloud, and then have a partner myRIO pull it down from the cloud and use it to steer a robotic arm. While this application may be 100% useless, it is also 110% awesome!