Trumpet Angle Detector

The inspiration for my project came from getting yelled at in marching band for the last two and a half years by my section leaders. In marching band, holding your trumpet straight ahead of you, parallel to the ground, its a recipe for disaster. Whether your hitting the person in front of you with the bell, or blowing out their eardrums while playing, it wont be a very fun time. Because of that, when marching you hold your trumpet roughly 15 degrees above parallel. This allows you to have your trumpet go above the head of any person in front of you, and allows you to not play in their ears. Unfortunately, holding your trumpet above parallel takes more effort than holding it flat, so people have a problem with dropping their trumpet down to low.

Upon hearing that the microbits could register rotation, not just vibration, I realized that I could use this to help solve the problem of people dropping their bells. I started off the project by making myself a checklist of all the things my device would need.

It would need:

• To be easily removable (it would be very annoying in concert band)

• To be visible, or in some way be able to alert the player

• To not obstruct the trumpets ability to be played

• To be accurate enough to be useful

• To not disturb other nearby players

The programming itself was not very difficult, all I had to do was set a range of degrees or rotation, and have it give some sort of alert if the trumpet rotated outside of the range.

With this programming, I was able to succeed in some of my goals for the project. It was able to alert the player if the angle was incorrect, with both a visual display and an audio cue, and it was an alert that wouldn't disturb the players around if earbuds were used to play the audio. The rotation sensing itself was a problem, but I will get into that shortly as it has nothing to do with the programming. The rest of the problems I encountered were hardware.

I needed to find some way to attach the microbit, as well as the attachments such as the battery pack and alligator clips, to my trumpet. As I didn't want it to get in the way of concert band, it needed to be non-permanent and easily removable. This eliminated things such as velcro and zip ties. To fulfill both of these requirements, I decided on rubber bands to attach them.

As you can see in the picture, my rubber banding was quite chaotic as I tried to minimize the movement of the board. The rubber bands however were not stable enough to keep the board still.

However, this lead to problems as I wasn't able to position the microbit on the trumpet consistently, and the board would shift around as the trumpet moved. The rubber bands were steady enough to keep it from falling, but it would still move enough to mess up the rotation sensor. So while I was able to succeed in most of my goals, it was easily mountable and removable and it didn't interfere with the playing of the instrument, I was unable to make it accurate enough to be useful, which was one of the most important goals of this project. I am not sure how I could have improved my method of attachment while still fulfilling my other goals, but maybe with more time I could have thought of something.