Cheap flights

The truss rod has been made (thanks Eaton!), but the fittings at each end are still in the machine shop somewhere. Once it is completed the inside of the neck can be attacked once more, but until then I need to carry on with all the other stuff that needs to be hidden behind the fboard.

The fboard lights (these could be called flights!!) need to be built. The dots are pretty straightforward, but the pacman is going to take a little more effort. For the worlds first animated bass (as far as I know...) to get the flights looking decent. The lights needs to be in the right places and not in the wrong places. Sounds easy enough...

I have decided that pacman's body needs to be made up of eight 45 degree segments. The chomping mouth is then made by turning the West one off, followed by NW and SW. This sequence is going to be governed by a PIC microcontroller.

The tiny piece of pad-board holding the LEDs is shown here. These are surface mount 1206 LEDs which are large enough to be soldered with a normal iron.

The PIC is mounted on another board so that the code can be developed. The real advantage here is that as long as the PIC can switch each LED on and off, the sequencing and all the cunning stuff can be done later. The PIC will eventually be situated somewhere in the body of the guitar and will be fairly easy to get to.

Seven of the eight LEDs are lit so that pacmans mouth is slightly open (ie W off). It needs to have a piece of translucent acrylic over the top to even out the light in each segment, but I think it should be recognisable when its going.

At least there's no splinters involved with this work. I need to do the ghost illumination next, and the dots. Only pacman is animated, the other LEDs will just be on or off together (which should make the programming a bit easier to cope with).

It doesn't matter how long you've been an electronic engineer, you just can't beat a circuit that makes LEDs flash on & off.

Fantastic!