Johnny, Josh, and I are working to build a device that recognizes different musical notes on a ukulele for our semester project. In essence, the device acts as a tuner. After last week’s Build-A-Printer event, we all discussed a few ideas as to how we should approach this project. Ultimately, we decided to break up the work by what each of us are most passionate about. Annie and I are extremely fascinated by the software aspect of what our project entails whereas Johnny is heavily interested in the design and aesthetic appeal of our device. To be quite honest, Annie and I didn’t really know what kind of software goes into a tuning device. After doing quite a bit of research, we both realized that we can incorporate an Arduino or a Galileo into our project and have it act as the foundation of the tuner! We have been experimenting with different microphones to pick up different soundwaves, which we think will be a great way for a tuner to pick up the pitch. As for the design, Johnny plans on creating a casing for the arduino so that it would not be damaged or easily tampered with through Autodesk Fusion and then 3D printed. We discussed a few ideas and thought of a funny pun we could use, and we finally decided to shape the casing into a fish and call our final project the “TUNA-lele.” Since all of us are inspired by music, this project has been very fun to talk about! However, as we’ve begun designing, we’ve encountered a few issues. The main difficulty will be the size of the Arduino in the casing, but we may be able to fix this once we design our first prototype. We are also playing around with the idea of making it Bluetooth enabled as a unique aspect of this project. We’re really excited to work on this and cannot wait to present our make at the end of the semester! We will be looking for additional help from the Gurus at the Fab Lab and will be working on our project at the MakerLab and the Fab Lab.