Engineering Student's Robotic Bass a YouTube Hit

10 Dec 2012 - 09:31:08 in Research
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A video clip demonstrating the MechBass robotic bass guitar designed by Victoria engineering student James McVay has attracted nearly 500,000 views on YouTube in just two weeks. The fourth-year student designed and built the robotic bass guitar, which sounds like the traditional instrument but looks like a stack of aluminium extrusions, illuminated circuit boards and a web of cables.

The idea was one of a number offered to Honours students for their full-year research topic and, says James, “it looked like fun”. James’ supervisor Professor Dale Carnegie gave him plenty of room to get creative and the resulting instrument is about one metre wide, 60 centimetres tall and is a full four-string bass guitar.

Being computer-controlled, James says the instrument is not bound by the limitations of a human player. “It can play much faster—it does 60 picks per second—and does other things on the strings a human hand wouldn't be capable of. “But the great thing is that if you weren't looking at it, you would think you were listening to a normal bass guitar.”

It turned out to be a bigger undertaking than James had anticipated—he estimates he has spent at least 1,000 hours working on the project. “There are over 800 bolts in it, lots of cables, and I spent hours designing control boards and laser cutting different designs and 3D printing them to see what worked and what didn’t.” But he’s happy with the result. “It’s quite fascinating to watch all these different components working together and producing good music.”

James and Professor Carnegie will present the project at the Electronics New Zealand Conference in Dunedin later this month.Next year, James plans to continue his studies at Victoria by completing a Master’s degree in Engineering. He will work with Professor Carnegie developing search and rescue robots.

To see James’ invention in action, the link to the YouTube clip is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UYMnzXQEtw.

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