College of Engineering

Jacob D. Wong

College of Engineering

Electrical Engineering

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Youngmoo Kim

Electrical & Computer Engineering

Jeff Gregorio Co-Mentor

Actuated Vibraphone

Significant advances have come to digital devices within the past two decades through their user-interfaces, more specifically as low barrier to entry touch devices. Most digital devices are not expressive or interesting when viewing a presentation of their interfaces and are not fully showing the interface capabilities. Alternatively, instruments are highly expressive with a high barrier to entry. My research was in actuated instruments or the ability to control instruments through a custom user-interface. By actuating them, their user-interface (normal play) can be made easier and more user-friendly. This specific project used a series of microcontrollers to recognize musical data from a computer and then play specific notes on a vibraphone. I researched the fragility of the electrical system and how to stop the power supply from destroying the microcontrollers. Since the system is as compact as possible, it is also fragile especially when transferring a lot of electricity. I decided to use opto-isolators which use light to separate the different parts of the system to stop damage from occurring to the microcontrollers. The vibraphone is meant to engage professional and general audiences in musical/technical concepts.