Electric Guitar With BBC Micro:bit

Inspiration

A guitar is a plucked stringed musical instrument. Normally, the guitar is expensive, but here I have created a cheap and convenient DIY that can help you enjoy and play real chords on an electric micro: bit guitar. Enjoy micro: bit guitar by shifting the pitch up and down octaves.

What it does

When you touch pin 1 or pin 2 and GND it will play a broken chord, but now you can move the chord down an octave (lowering its pitch) by pressing button A and move it up an octave (raising its pitch) by pressing button B.

The pitch (frequency) of a note doubles when you move up one octave: middle A has a frequency of 440Hz (440 vibrations per second), high A has a frequency of 880Hz. This is why making the vibrating part of guitar strings different lengths with your fingers changes the pitch of the note being played.

How we built it

micro: bit and optional battery pack

4 crocodile clip leads

cardboard, scissors, glue, tin foil

headphones, buzzer, or powered speaker

• Connect tin foil pads to the 0, 1, 2 and GND input pins on the micro:bit.
• When you touch the GND pin and one of the other pins, the program plays the note F, A or C in a guitar sound on your computer’s audio output.

We were so excited to create this DIY guitar to help me and others learn and enjoy playing guitar.

Final Working Video

What's next for Electronic Guitar

We will try to make it more optimized and add some more chords to it.