Arduino Uno | Taking the next steps in Electronics

Our projects up until now have covered the basics – those which are effective, yet easy to build.

To build electronics projects with a greater degree of complexity, more detailed circuit designs are needed that may be more time consuming to build. There is a solution called Arduino.

Arduino is an easy to use electronics platform, with its open source circuit boards and software. At the heart of Arduino is a small set of microcontrollers that execute a program written in C++ which is hosted via the Arduino Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Boards such as the Arduino Uno or Nano are readily available at reasonable prices and provide a convenient project base. With a bit of experience you can breakaway and build your own circuits using one or more of the Arduino supported microcontrollers.

Guitar tuner- the circuit diagram

One big advantage of microcontrollers is they work with relatively few additional components, which is ideal when it comes to building. The guitar pitch tuner design was produced using the Arduino platform using the ATtiny45 microcontroller. Although simple to build it does require a bit of experience using the Arduino ISP – this basically uses a spare Uno or Nano to program the microcontroller. For further details just search “Ardunio as ISP programmer”. If this seems daunting, the guitar pitch tuner could easily be transferred to the Uno or Nano. If so the program code could be simplified by using the tone function.

For anyone interested in building the guitar pitch tuner using the ATtiny45 we have included a video, circuit diagram and program code below.

// Guitar Pitch Tuner by Guy Nicholson 22/5/21. //ATtiny45,16MHz external clock. int COUNT=1; const int SOUNDOUT=0; int PITCH=1500;//1st string pitch int DURATION=500; void setup() { pinMode(SOUNDOUT,OUTPUT); } void loop() { int LENGTH=0; while (LENGTH<DURATION) { digitalWrite (SOUNDOUT,HIGH); delayMicroseconds (PITCH); digitalWrite (SOUNDOUT,LOW); delayMicroseconds (PITCH); LENGTH++; } delay (2500); COUNT=COUNT+1; if (COUNT>3) { PITCH=2000;//2nd string pitch } if (COUNT>6) { PITCH=2520;//3rd string pitch } if (COUNT>9) { PITCH=3380;//4th string pitch } if (COUNT>9) { DURATION=250; } if (COUNT>12) { PITCH=4500;//5th string pitch } if (COUNT>15) { PITCH=6000;//6th string pitch } if (COUNT>18) { COUNT=0;//resets loop } if (COUNT==0) { PITCH=1500;//resets to 1st string pitch DURATION=500; } }

Taking the next steps with Arduino | Electronics Projects