Make: Online : The Prism laser synth-guitar

The Prism laser synth-guitar

MAKE subscriber Jeff made this really sweet laser synth-guitar that he calls The Prism.

The Prism is a laser guitar, with four laser beams acting as "strings" that can be held to produce a tone. A Sharp IR range finder detects the musician's hand on the fretboard to change the pitch. You can select sine, tri or square waveform outputs, and introduce classic synthesizer effects like sync, skew and LFO.

Full instructions (it's quite a complex project) are up on Instructables.

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Posted by: Matt on July 14, 2009 at 9:36 AM

But is it solar powered?

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Posted by: Mig on July 15, 2009 at 1:16 AM

Wow!

Excellent project and no programming too = no arduinoez.

How the hell did this get onto Make?!

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Posted by: Mig on July 15, 2009 at 1:23 AM

Ah man!

I put some joke html tags in the above post suggesting I was only kidding about the Ardweenoaz.

But seriously I think it just goes to show, as is often bemaoned on HackaDay, that sometimes people use a microcontroller when one is not needed.

Bravo!

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Posted by: jeff-o on July 16, 2009 at 10:00 AM

Simplicity is something to strive for...

I have to agree. I think the Arduino is a fantastic piece of tech (and I do own one myself!) but once the prototyping is done it's time to yank out the Atmel chip and build a smaller dedicated circuit around it.

In this case, I wanted to keep everything all analog, to keep things "pure." Plus, my programming skills are not so hot either. ;)

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