I went to the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon Saturday/Sunday and they featured me on the website!  Check it out:

http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/08/strumbot/

I’ve never really sang in front of such a large audience before, so I was scared as hell, but I knew that the most effective way to get the message across about Strumbot would be to do a live demo.  So, I decided that this was my chance and that I’d go for it.  Anyway, the mic unfortunately didn’t really pick up the strumming, so it was mostly just karaoke, but I still had fun and definitely conquered another fear!

 

A little bit more about Strumbot: It’s a node.js application that is connected to an Arduino that powers a single servo. There is a web frontend using websockets that allows you to click different buttons to select different strum patterns. The servo I used is actually a complete piece of junk, but I unfortunately had nothing else. I actually have 2 high-speed servos coming in the mail, so they should be more up to the task. I had to sand down the pick to about 1/2 of its thickness because the servo was so damn weak! Strumbot is great for: people who want to learn gutiar, people who have no rhythm, and people who may have lost an arm but still want to play guitar. Strumbot is hosted on github here (and hardware, you’ll have to build yourself, obviously):

https://github.com/ytham/strumbot