User:Jdassoulas/ENES-100 Guitar Pickup Group

=ENES-100 Guitar Pickup Group=

Group Members

 * Mohammad Zaidi


 * Shiv Patel


 * John Messiha


 * Michael Staggers


 * Jonathan Dassoulas

Goal
Our Goal is to design a guitar pickup that can be used on any acoustic guitar. We will learn how magnetic guitar pickups work, and we will also learn how to design a part in a CAD software and then print it on the 3D printer.

What is a Pickup?
A pickup device is a transducer that captures mechanical vibrations from stringed instruments such as the electric guitar, electric bass guitar, Chapman Stick, or electric violin, and converts them to an electrical signal that is amplified, recorded, or broadcast.

How does it Work?
It is basically magnets wrapped in coiled wire, that connects to a 1/4 in plug, that would plug into an amplifier. Because the guitar strings are metal, they interfere with the magnetic field that the magnets wrapped in coil have, and the vibration of the guitar strings sends a signal down the coiled wire.

Magnetic pickups
A magnetic pickup consists of a permanent magnet with a core of material such as alnico or ceramic, wrapped with a coil of several thousand turns of fine enameled copper wire. The pickup is most often mounted on the body of the instrument, but can be attached to the bridge, neck or pickguard, as on many electro-acoustic archtop jazz guitars and string basses. The permanent magnet creates a magnetic field; the motion of the vibrating steel strings disturbs the field, and the changing magnetic flux induces a voltage in the coil. This signal is then carried to amplification or recording equipment via a cable. There may also be an internal preamplifier stage between the pickup and cable.

Piezoelectric pickups
Many semi-acoustic and acoustic guitars, and some electric guitars and basses, have been fitted with piezoelectric pickups instead of, or in addition to, magnetic pickups. These have a very different sound, and also have the advantage of not picking up any other magnetic fields, such as mains hum and feedback from monitoring loops. In hybrid guitars, this system allows switching between magnetic pickup and piezo sounds, or simultaneously blending the output. Solid bodied guitars with only a piezo pickup are known as silent guitars, which usually used for practicing by acoustic guitarists. Piezo pickups can be also built into electric guitar bridges for conversion of existing instruments.

Most pickups for bowed string instruments, such as cello, violin, and double bass, are piezoelectric. These may be inlaid into the bridge, laid between the bridge feet and the top of the instrument, or, less frequently, wedged under a wing of the bridge. Some pickups are fastened to the top of the instrument with removable putty.

Active and passive pickups
Pickups can be either active or passive. Pickups, apart from optical types, are inherently passive transducers. "Active" pickups incorporate electronic circuitry to modify the signal. "Passive" pickups are usually wire wound around a magnet, and are the most common type used. They can generate electric potential without need for external power, though their output is relatively low, and the harmonic content of output depends greatly on the winding.

The disadvantages of active pickup systems is the need for an external power source such as a battery or phantom power, increasing their complexity of use. Active system are generally more expensive than standard passive systems. Active electronics are more common with bass guitars than regular electric guitars.

The main advantages of active pickup systems is the ability to use active, multi-band equalization with the onboard preamp and they typically have a wider dynamic range than passive pickups, as well as higher overall output. This gives them the capability of producing sounds with higher fidelity and a characteristic clarity.

Optical pickups
Optical pickups are a fairly recent development that work by sensing the interruption of a light beam by a vibrating string. The light source is usually a LED, and the detector is a photodiode or phototransistor.[9] These pickups are completely resistant to magnetic or electric interference and also have a very broad and flat frequency response, unlike magnetic pickups.

Week 1: Research and Bill of Materials

 * DIY Guitar pickup


 * Magnets for Pickup


 * How pickups work

Materials and Pricing

Week 3: Prototype
We decided to make a prototype for our project so that we would be able to see if our idea would work. If the our prototype works, we will go ahead with our project and create our final design. If the prototype does not work, then we will either try to get it to work, or change our project entirely. For the prototype,we needed magnets, something that the magnets could sit on, and we needed copper coil. We cut out the bottoms of two blue plastic cups and used those for the outer piece of the pickup. For the magnets, we took two out of an old hard drive which was found in the engineering lab. We hot glued the magnets together just to make sure that they would not move at all, and then we hot glued the bottoms of the cups to the magnets. Once we finished that part, we took copper coil from the engineering lab and wrapped it around the magnets. After wrapping the coil, we took the ends of the copper coil and used a match to burn the enamel off of the coil. The ends of the coil were then connected to an auxiliary cable which plugged into the amplifier.

Week 4: Test
We tested our prototype and it works very well. The sound quality is good and it seems to be working consistently. Unfortunately, we will not be able to create our final design due to lack of time. We will, however, make a second prototype in case the one we have now stops working and so we can show what the pickup looks like without taking it off of the guitar.

Presentation

 * Presentation 1