Electro Pedal Steel Build

[Jacobus De Bruyn]

Hi there Eric,

I ended up using servo motors again. I used servos in my first Electro Steel, but in that guitar the servos were a little noisy. Not a major issue, as only I could hear it.

For this guitar, I originally designed it to use stepper motors, but eventually replaced them with servos.

Reason:
I started with a small stepper, which lost steps. I then moved to a larger stepper that worked better but still lost count intermittently. I later discovered that the stepper controller I was using was too small (low current) for pulling the strings. I could use Steppers with shaft monitoring but as the bottom of the guitar became cluttered with too many components, I decided to switch back to servo motors.

On my first steel, the servos were directly connected to the body, which caused the noise. This time I made brackets that isolate the vibration, preventing the noise from transferring to the body. Problem solved—no servo noise.

Regarding the pick-up, I wound it with too many turns. I found that more windings do not make the sound louder, but instead add more treble. The pickup has 11,500 winds.

As the setup stands now, everything works as expected:

Strings ring for a long time

Servos directly follow pedals and levers

Manual tuning via small geared motors, controlled by an onboard touchpad or a phone app

Volume controlled via the touchpad or phone app

Auto-tune: select Auto on the touchpad or phone app, select the string, and strum it. The system automatically adjusts the string and shows green on the last bar when tuning is successful. If it shows red, strum again and it will re-tune.

Changing from E9 to C6 is insanely easy. Press C6 on the touchpad and, within a split second, the guitar is accurately tuned to C6. I don’t tune C6 directly; I tune E9 and use that setting as a reference to move to C6. The pedals also change accordingly.

I have a few upgrades in progress. One is the phone app. Although it works, it still needs improvement. Currently, the guitar sends its name; you select it, and the phone and touchpad start communicating. Another upgrade is the LED's

The LED's I use is the LED's with the integrated IC. You can use the LED strips with the 3 pins, + - and signal
You can use WS2812B or similar.

You can use a small ESP32 controller to drive the signal wire to a pre-setup. All you need is 5V DC and one output pin from the ESP32. That single pin communicates with all the LEDs. You can use any number of LEDs—I currently have 302 running.

Send me your progress and let me know where I can help.

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