Guyrandy Jean-Gilles' Raspberry Pi Pico-Powered Automated Guitar Tuner Gets You Pitch-Perfect Fast
Picking pitches up with a microphone, this 3D-printed tool automatically tunes the guitar — and provides visible feedback, too.
Maker Guyrandy Jean-Gilles has turned a Raspberry Pi Pico into an automated guitar tuner, in an effort to build an open source clone of a popular commercial product.
"This project provides source code and 3D-printable files for an automatic guitar tuner based off Band Industries' Roadie 3," Jean-Gilles explains. "Select the guitar string (low E, A, D, etc.) by turning the rotary switch. The corresponding LED will light up."
"Once the desired string is selected, place the tuner's head on the guitar's tuning peg. Pluck the desired string then press and hold the push button to enable the microphone. Wait until the both RGB LEDs blink green. The string is now tuned."
Unlike a traditional guitar tuning tool, an automated tuner uses a motor to physically turn the knob on the tuning peg until the string sounds true — bringing the guitar to pitch quickly and, if all goes well, with a minimum of error.
Jean-Gilles' creation works, though he offers it with a few caveats. "While the project is functional," he explains, "I couldn't get the note detection to work perfectly and the motor I used struggled at times to turn my guitar's tuning pegs. Again, it's functional so I have no plans to optimize the project, but maybe you'll find use in what I've done so far."
The source code, in C, and the 3D print files for the case and a gripper for the tuning peg knobs have been published to the project's GitLab repository under the permissive 3-Clause BSD license.