New Hobby

So, my fingers are sore....but I'm not complaining.  I decided to take up a new hobby lately, that of learning the guitar.  I've had my eye on the RockSmith bundle package from Sam's Club which comes with the game, both cables, and a Les Paul Jr. electric guitar.  For $80.00, this is a steal, really!  Online reviews of the Les Paul are favorable, given it's a bargain basement beginners guitar, and the Jr designation is not because it's a smaller size, that's just to indicate the model, which is to say that it's a lesser, not as quality manufacture as the prime time Les Paul is.  You may notice that it does not include an amp, more on that later.

I got the package home, unwrapped it all, popped the disk in the PS3, and a half hour later, I was hooked.  I'm really a music person, as anyone who knows me can tell you, although I have not played an instrument in quite some time (about three decades, give or take a couple years).  When I got done though, it wasn't because I wanted to, it was because my fingers on the fretting hand were well on their way to developing a set of bruises, especially the index finger as the game does nothing in the way of finger placement on the strings, so I used that one predominantly.

The next day, I downloaded a few apps to the iPhone and iPad, mainly guitar tuners and chord databases, but I got curious about making my Apple devices into an amp.  Sure enough, a Google search got me to 90% of a solution, as there are plenty of apps as well as commercial cables out there to buy.  Well, the wife put the brakes on my spending much, so I decided to get creative.  A few more searches turned up a guy who described how to build a cable, and a free app for the Apple devices.  After scrutinizing the instructions, I went to the local Radio Shack and picked up the parts I didn't have lying around for only $10.00.  About an hour later, I had the "cable" constructed.  Take a look at the picture below:

Now you see why the word cable above is in quotes...my design was purposeful and meant to be small as well as not have a lot of cables lying around.  My engineers brain has already designed the next phase of the device, but I can't implement it yet.  I did run into a snag, that of the instructions on the internet failed to work the first time.  I enlisted the help of my father, who spent his career with a soldering iron in his hand working on electronics for communications.  Two added components and the next test was successful, although there are still a few minor bugs to work out.  Here are some other pictures, sorry for the blackout.

The idea here is the app provides the functions that an amplifier would normally have in the way of knobs and logic for distortion of the signal and simply takes the input from the guitar and outputs the product to the headphone jack.  In this diagram, I have my computer speaker cord plugged into the speaker jack, but if you have a pair of bluetooth headphones, you can essentially jam out to your own tunes without disturbing anyone.  Furthermore, you could connect to an external bluetooth speaker from the iPhone as well.  In the future, I plan to go completely wireless and plug a wireless transmitter to the guitar jack and a receiver to the input side of this converter box, which will allow me the freedom to move without tripping over wires!