Hi everyone!
Happy E-week!
I’ve done a lot of cool engineering stuff in college so far, but one of my favorite projects I’ve ever done was building an electric guitar as part of my final project in a class I took last semester, EE202: Linear Circuits.
All we were given was a cigar box, a long block of wood, strings, and a pickup. We had to go to the woodshop to shape the wood into a handle and cut holes in the cigar box, attach the pickup, attach the strings, and then tune the guitar. That, however, was just the easy part. The hard part was building the circuit. We had to build an amplifier, a frequency to voltage converter, a tuner that lit up LEDs, and some sort of guitar effect (we made a distortion signal!).
This was one of the most challenging projects I have done because our time was pretty limited, and we needed to maximize our time in the lab in order to actually use the machines. However, at the end of the day, we managed to build a functional guitar with very limited supplies and almost no budget, which made it all worth it! (And the fact that we got an A!)