Our own David Neevel shares project plans and code for an Arduino-powered email-writing guitar.

WK recently allowed me some time to tackle a problem that plagues workers everywhere whether they are working in advertising or some other job that involves a lot of email typing. I’m talking about the problem of not being able to devote enough time practicing shredding the guitar. The solution of hooking a guitar up so that you could use it like a computer keyboard had been in my head for a few years and it was a real joy to get to follow through on it.

Learn about it from this video:

For anyone who would like to build their own Email Guitar I’ll show you some more on a few of my favorite parts of the project.

Here’s the plan I made before I started working on it. I ended up staying true to this plan.

Here’s the optoisolator circuit I used. Getting this thing to work was the hardest part of the project. A few other plans I found for this circuit didn’t work. I even bought a MIDI shield in desperation, and it didn’t work at all.

Here is the design for the relay board and the relay board itself with a couple components attached. It was the first time I’ve had a PCB board printed, and I was happy not to have screwed up so bad I had to scrap it and start all over.

In order to make the relay make the right connections on the keyboard brains, I had to map out the connections made on the keyboard. These are the layers in a keyboard that the relays are taking the place of. I color coded them to make them easier to follow.

Once I got all that working correctly it was time to program the arduino. That was a lot of work but it was pretty straightforward. Here is a link to the code I used.

Hopefully soon workplaces will be filled with the tones of badass guitars instead of boring key click noises!

See more of Neevel’s projects at his personal site, DavidNeevel.com.