User:Jdassoulas/ENES100/Project2

My Instructor's user page which points to this.

Week0 Preferences
After going through two ideas for a project, between building a bridge and building a guitar pickup, we chose pickup. I play guitar and i wanted to see if we could make a pickup for an acoustic guitar. We decided the pickup because it was interesting and different than other projects. Through this project we could also learn CAD design and 3D printing.

Week1 Narrative
The first week I brought my guitar in and we made measurements so that we could design the top of the guitar pickup. I made the measurements. Other group members did a lot of research to figure out the different types of pickups and how they work. Michael began the cad design of the top of the pickup and i began searching for the magnets to order.

Week2 Narrative
Week 2 we finished the cad design and I found magnets to order, and ordered them. However the magnet store was out of stock on the item that i wanted, so were stuck there at the moment. I also began building a prototype for the pickup. I pulled two magnets out of a hard drive and put two pieces of a plastic cup on the outside so that it could hold in coiled wire. I then coiled wire all around the magnets and hot glued the whole thing together. The next step is to solder the two wires to either an aux cable or a 1/4 inch cable. We are planning more for the aux cable so that we wouldn't have to bring in a whole guitar amplifier but with an aux cable we could just bring in a small speaker.

Week3 Narrative
On week three, I continued to search for a website that i could order our specific magnets. I finally found one that I put in an order for 6 magnets at the size that we wanted. I got an email back from the company saying they were out of stock of that magnet and they need. instead of waiting to find those magnets to continue our project, I decided that we would make a prototype. I stayed after class on Monday to find magnets in the engineering lab. John Stapko told me there were magnets in these old hard drives that they had. I took apart the hard drive and pulled out the magnets .On Wednesday I continued to build the prototype. I used hot glue to stick the two magnets i found together and also I cut out plastic cups to use as the top and bottom of the pickup. I also hot glued the plastic cup pieces to the magnets. With the help of Michael, I wound the copper coil around the magnets. Then we all went outside and burned off the enamel coating from the end of the wire. I took the pickup home intending to connect the wires to either an aux cable or a .25 in cable, and then test it on the guitar.

Week4 Narrative
On Monday morning, I searched my house for a pair of earphones. I brought a pair of standard white earphones to class hoping that we could cut it and strip it and use it as an aux cable but there was strange almost fabric like wires inside and we did not know how to connect it. That night, I went out and bought an aux cable. At home, I tried to strip it and connect it to the pickup, but there were three wires in the aux cable and the pickup only had two wires. I finally just grabbed one of my .25 in. cables and stripped that and it only had two connections. Because the gauge of the copper coil on the pickup was so small, I decided that it would've just burned off if i tried to solder it, so I just wrapped the copper coil around the connections on the .25 inch cable. I put it on my guitar and connected the pickup to the amp. It worked! I brought it to class on Wednesday, and showed my group that it worked. We built a second prototype so we could show people what it looked like when we did our presentation. On thursday we did our presentation for the engineering project night thing that we did. On Thursday before the presentation, I created the slideshow for our presentation and I believe Michael made some minor edits to it. The presentation went well and that was the end of our project.