Building a Raspberry Pi-based accessible Smart Guitar – DroidconUK

The device, which is based around a Raspberry Pi, is dubbed the Chord Assist and the talk was given at the London event by Joe Birch, an Android Engineer and Google Developer Expert for Android.

He described it as a means to help mute, deaf or blind people experience the guitar – specifically, to help them learn to play chords.

We’re talking Actions on Google, a bit of Firebase (where chord information is stored) and Google Cloud – the Chord Assist smart guitar allows people who are blind, deaf or mute to be able to learn, play and tune their guitar. Basically, a way to reduce the friction of learning a new instrument.

Play

The user first requests a chord to learn. This can be presented in Braille, via the GPIO pins, and solenoids and relay switch.

It is also presented visually via a small display – we’re talking a Four Letter pHAT, pictured right, a four 14-segment displays driven by the HT16K33 chip over I2C, which Joe got from Pimoroni.

A vibrating motor serves as a progress indicator, with Joe explaining he took inspiration from pedestrian crossings (they give haptic feedback underneath the box).

You can view a full videocast of the keynote on the SkillsMatter website (you have to register, of course, and with Vimeo) – the company runs the annual Droidcon UK event.

As a context for the keynote he outlined the size of the demographics involved when considering accessibility issues, for example that 15% of the world’s population have disabilities and 1.3 billion people worldwide have visual impairments.

Android Things

The origins of the system were actually an Android Things project called BrailleBox, which he created in 2017 — a Braille News Reader for the partially sighted.

Joe has also documented his guitar project on Medium, and you can check out a video of the guitar in action.

Image: Joe Birch