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The Fretboard is a pretty simple Arduino project that visualizes the build status of up to 24 projects with an addressable LED array. The latest incarnation of the project is housed in an old classical guitar … hence the name ;-)

It's all open-sourced, so check out the "Resources" page for code. Feel free to borrow any ideas for your own build.


The build has been a slow burn … 3 months of little packages of components arriving from China, and another couple of months procrastinating over different ideas for housing the project - the physical build is far more involved than the electronics, which couldn't be simpler!

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Arrival

This is where it started - taking delivery of a WS2811-based addressable LED Strip from aliexpress for all of USD$17.
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Build the Bridge

The easy part - not many components involved. All driven from a 5V 2.5A power supply.
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Ghost in the Shell

As installed within the guitar body. Mounting the Arduino is a bit old school, but works OK.
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La Guitarra

I bought this in Brunswick about 25 years ago, and it's the one guitar to survive all my many moves since, more for sentimental reasons than any sonorous character. Finally, for the chop!
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On The Block

For those about to chop, we salute you.
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Sliced and Drilled

Drilling clean holes through the neck turned out to be troublesome. Perhaps my rusty toolsmanship, or just tinder dry wood, but I managed to splinter what should have been smooth bores for the LEDs.
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Stripped

A quick strip back of the grundgy neck and body before painting.
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Undercover

Painting begins with a white undercoat in acrylic. Here you can clearly see one LED holes I fluffed.
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Painted Lady

The somewhat amateurish paint-job complete! It has a gloss varnish finish.
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Boing!… I'm In the Back

Ethernet and power connectors. You can also see the LED array strung along the back of the neck - turned out no special tie-down required for the wiring.
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Crank It!

Bench test, and all's looking good. Only 16 LEDs alight, because that's the number of projects I have on CI at the moment - the remaining 8 LEDs will be used as more projects added to the CI server.
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With More Drama

Enter the arena…

The heart of the project is an Arduino with an Ethernet Shield. It polls the web for current build status, parses the result, and drives an addressable LED array to display the status of up to 24 projects. The 24-project limit is an artificial one, imposed by the physical housing on a guitar neck (2 projects per fret to the 12th fret). It could do many more…

See the FretBoard GitHub repository for the Arduino code and more details of the on-board processing.

The Arduino has limited memory and networking support, so to simplify process of getting build status, the request is proxied via a site which offers the build status in a simplified CSV format over HTTP.

A suitable proxy that can handle the CruiseControl XmlStatusReport format is included in the repository for this web application.

Electronics Layout

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Circuit Schematic

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All the code and design details for The Fretboard are open-source. Feel free to fork or borrow any ideas for your own build. If you build anything similar, I'd love to hear about it - you contact me through GitHub or on twitter @tardate

  • fretboard_web - GitHub repository for this website, including build status proxy endpoint
  • FretBoard - GitHub repository for the Arduino code and circuit design

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