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Upright Laser Harp Shield

A project log for Upright Laser Harp

New spin on the laser blocking musical instrument

jonathan-bumsteadJonathan Bumstead 09/21/2019 at 06:220 Comments

The design for the Upright Laser Harp shield is completed! This shield will be placed on top of the Music Maker Shield and Arduino Mega. The following components will be connected directly to the shield:

  1. Laser control signals
  2. Photoresistor analog output
  3. Volume potentiometer
  4. Instrument wheel rotary encoder
  5. Hall effect sensor
  6. Buck converter (12V input to 5V output)

The most difficult part in the upright laser harp build is all the wire wrapping and building up the prototype board. Now all the these components will just connect via JST into the board. With this design improvement, there will be no tracking wires to the right Arduino pins required and no wire wrapping.

The entire electrical setup with be compact and fit within the footprint of the Arduino Mega, which is much smaller than the current setup up with prototype board. In the first prototype, all the signals from the lasers and photoresistors connected to the prototype board and then had to all be wired again to the Arduino. Now there will only be one connector to the Upright Laser Harp shield. Here are some screenshots of the PCB design in Autodesk Fusion. 

I know there is a lot going on in these schematics, so I made a high-level overview of how everything connects to the shield. The white rectangles are JST connectors. In the screenshots above, the laser and photoresistor signals from the four corners of the device are labelled as LAPH0, LAPH1, LAPH2, and LAPH3 (LAPH is a abbreviation for LAser and PHotoresistor signals). 

After a lot of brainstorming and designing, I finally arrived at the second iteration of the electronics for the upright laser harp. I ordered some boards for building up version 2.  

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