Introduction

 

We created a digital guitar tuner that takes output from an electric guitar and helps the user tune it to “Standard E” tuning.

 

The user interacts with the device by pushing buttons to select which string he or she is tuning. The user then plucks the string and the device displays if the string is too high frequency (sharp), too low frequency (flat), or within 0.5% of the desired value. We chose this project because both of us play guitar and don’t want to pay a lot for tuners. We were also very interested in applying some of the Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and analog amplification principles we learned in some of our other classes. This project gave us the opportunity to test out these principles in a real-world design.