Hope Fletcher Portfolio
LEDify It
The LEDify It Design Challenge: Make an object not normally illuminated more awesome by adding LED lights to it.
Light-Up Guitar
The user group is anyone who plays guitar for an audience, to impress another. Usually, someone would use a guitar to create music, for themselves or someone else. It can be therapeutic.
By adding LEDs, more attention is drawn to the guitar, lighting up the area and making the strings visible. The lights can impress an audience and be colorized to match a theme that an average guitar without custom paint won’t have. Green and red for Christmas, blue for a boy or pink for a girl, and pink and red for Valentine’s day. Then, the user will turn the lights on while playing and can glance at the strings with clear lighting.
My goal is to, first, create light so the strings of the guitar are visible to a user who needs that. Second, to impress an audience with fancy colors.
Ideate
Prototype
Test Feedback
Hiding wires near the sound hole would've made it look a lot cleaner.
Lights throughout the body of the guitar, performing with it would be cool to watch.
Make sure the wires are all connected and that the LEDs work on both sides.
It would be really cool if you could light up the outline of the entire guitar.
Having the battery pack and switch in a place where it won’t hinder use.
Having LEDs going around the entire guitar. Maybe also having more colors, and a flash setting some how.
The LEDs don't even work, so we need a better circuit going and also put the switches in a more convenient location.
Make the LEDs actually work, add more LEDs. Just try to make it work.
Having all the strings would be helpful, and it would also be helpful if the LEDs were not dead.
I believe that if they had more time with this project they could've added LEDs to the head of the guitar.
Scores
Reflection
My favorite part of this project was ideating because you really can think of anything. The worst part is right after when your dreams are crushed by the realization that you might not be capable of this yet. Although, I love trying to think creatively about what could be, just like this guitar. I was going to add around 50 LEDs, but that’s not so simple.
The biggest challenge and frustration for me was when I finished soldering the wires for my guitar and tested the LEDs: half of them wouldn’t turn on. I switched the wires, thinking it may have been a + - issue, but that wasn’t it. I removed the resistor, checked to see if the LEDs had burned out, asked my STEAM teacher what he thought of it, and I found no solutions. I understood that I had failed because only half the LEDs lit up, but during the peer review process my guitar’s wires seemed to have been cut and broken- so I really failed. Over 50% of my peer reviews mentioned how the guitar didn’t light up, even though I left five of those LEDs working just fine. Whatever happened during the review rendered my guitar completely ruined.
If I could redo this project and work even harder- skip even more meals and lose even more sleep- just to try and impress someone with my guitar, I would double-check the + - for the LEDs and battery, find the best resistor for the voltage according to my math, fix the guitar strings (because a peer reviewer had a problem with how my already broken guitar had only four strings), beautifully solder my wires, hide the circuit with something other than tape, and place the circuit somewhere it wouldn’t interfere with playing- then shake test it so a crazy heavy metal guitar player won’t shatter my project.
Overall, I failed, I’m disappointed, I’m hungry and I’m tired. It’s amazing how much effort you can put into something and still fail. I skipped all of my lunches, brought my guitar home from school to work on if I could, and spent all of my extra time at school when I could be having fun and being happy just to try to get an A. An A for a project and class I didn’t choose to be in. If there’s something I learned from this project, and STEAM, it’s that I will fail, be disappointed, frustrated, tired, and hungry, but at least I’ll do it better the next time. STEAM very much teaches the power of the word YET to me rather than circuits. When I grow up, I’ll be a writer, an artist, a musician- something that will never have me touch a single circuit or anything about engineering because that stuff honestly really depresses me and I want to be happy, but STEAM has taught me that I don’t get what I want and I’ll fail and then I’ll succeed- maybe.