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Project Conception
  1. Brainstorming
  2. Planning
  3. Research
  4. Questions

Brainstorming

When I applied to FabAcademy, I wanted to work on accessible ergonomic keyboards focused on people with physical disabilities. I got the idea after getting myself a charachorder and thinking about improvements I would like to do on it, and how others could benefit too. While this is still a project that I would consider doing in the future, it is not something I am currently too passionate about.

Although in my research I mostly looked at charachorder, datahand, lalboard, and svalboard; Azeron's gaming keypad is the closest existing reference to what I had in mind for this idea. See below how they are achieving exactly what I would have sought out to do:

Azeron keyboard replacement

When I went home for the holidays recently, I saw first hand how much time was spent organizing my grandmother's medication. This got me thinking that a cool project could be a smart pill organizer; where after some inputs from her, she could essentially empty full bottles of medication and have the system sort it and store it for her, reminding her at selected times to take certain pills and dispensing them for her. I thought that like her, there must be many people that could benefit from this. This would definitely be a cool project for the future, but it would also imply a lot of responsibility (wrong dose dispatch could have severe effects on someone) and I am not sure how much I will be able to master the skills needed to make this project reliable enough. This is a sketch of what I had in mind for this project:

Pill Organizer Sketch

Other ideas I had about potential final projects I would enjoying working on were a remote controlled foiling sailboat, a toolbox that fetches tools for you and then organizes them when you return them, and a smart hydraulic fittings organizer (similar concept to the smart pill organizer). However I wasn't passionate about any of these.

On the second day of FabAcademy, when I was on the metro heading to the Lab, I had a light-bulb moment. You see, when I was a teenager in high school, I played the tenor saxophone in my school's orchestra. I loved playing the instrument and ever since I left it, I have wanted to re-learn it and keep practicing. I always made up excuses for myself. It's an expensive, time-consuming, loud instrument. But what if it didn't have to be? Although I do want to commit to buying a real brass one and re-learning the skill, what if I can make one for myself? A personally produced electronic saxophone that can connect to my headphones instead of torturing the entire street. It will be cheaper. It won't be less time consuming because I will have to do it, but I was going to have to do some project anyways. And it can be as loud as I want or as quiet as the neighbors want. Sure, this may not change other people's lives but I think I will have fun doing it. The following is an initial sketch of what I would like to do:

Electric Saxophone Sketch

Planning

The minimum viable product for this project would be a 3D printed casing with the same dimensions of a tenor saxophone, where a regular mouthpiece can be inserted, with a siphon system to keep moisture outside of the unit, where:

  1. The user's breath inflates a chamber. A sensor detects how much the chamber inflates by reading the distance it travels, and that signals the intensity of the volume to the speaker
  2. The user presses buttons (keys), generating inputs that get sent to the microcontroller
  3. The microcontroller uses the inputs to command an eemprom, wich has samples stored for every key combination.
  4. The eeprom then sends digital signals to a digital-to-analog converter which emmits the corresponding voltage for every sound
  5. The voltage emmitted by the converter then passes through the audio amplifier before going to the speaker

As a baseline, this can barely be considered a saxophone. It's more like a saxophone shaped keyboard with breath controlled volume. But after being able to integrate all this, it can be spiralled into:

  1. Not only measuring the breath pressure, but also the breath flow, so that the oscillation of both values changes the frequency and pitch of the sound. (In my research, I saw somebody else that was building an electronic saxophone who tried to produce the same effect by putting a force-sensitive resistor sensor between his mouthpiece and reed, where the resistor was half of a voltage divider, so that the voltage in the middle varied with the force on the reed and in turn varied the sound being output. However, I want to be able to use regular mouthpieces in mine so I will go this different way)
  2. Making the buttons as similar as possible to the keys of a regular saxophone in both shape and feeling. Shape-wise it can be easily achieved by scanning the keys on a saxophone and replicating their dimensions when 3D printing. Feeling wise, I can play with the springs on the keys and how they interact with the PCB as switches.

Research

Questions