Welcome to tinkernut.com video cast, if you have any questions please email me at admin@tinkernut.com in this video I am going to show you how you can make your own guitar hero clone using free software and a guitar that you can make for about $22. As for the free software just go to Google search for fret on fire, it is a free guitar hero clone that uses your keyboard instead of a guitar to play the game.
It is available for Windows, Linux and Mac computers. So just download it for the computer that you have and go ahead and start it up. And just to get a fill for the interface you can see that if you go down to settings and key settings that you can change what each key on your keyboard does for the game. So you can set those to your preference, you can also import songs from the actual guitar hero game if you have that. To build the guitar control you will needed a toy guitar for $10 and the USB keypad for $12. Now I got this idea from car phase bass, I met in instructables.com so feel free to check them out for more information.
Take out the batteries first of all and then rip open the toy guitar and disconnect anything going to the battery pack or the sound controller. In fact just take out the sound controller in the speaker completely because we are not going to need that. Then find the wire that go to the fret buttons and take out the thread all together. Then head over to your little USB keypad and rip it open and take out the keys and the USB circuit board. And if you open up the keys you will find that there is another printed circuit board inside of it. So what I did was I took this out and I numbered each one the buttons. And if you want fold it you will find that there is two circuits to go to each button that make it connect so one option is to take some wire intend foil and tape each one of the wires to the corresponding circuits on the circuit board and then just solder them to the fret buttons.
So that is one option it is kind of bulky as you can see here but it does work. A better option is that if you take a look at this diagram you will see that each button has two corresponding connectors and each of these connectors go to one of 11 different circuits. If you delay it out in the matrix you would see that the star button goes to circuits six and 11 the nine button goes to circuits six and three. And this is where all of them would go. So the buttons that I chose with once that where would be the easiest to wire so the ones color to the one that I chose. So that if you go the USB circuit board rip out the connector that goes to the keypad you will see a 11 different posts. And the ones that the color in black here are the one is that I chose and then this is the wiring diagram of where each wire would go.
So now just solders from wires to these seven different posts and then sold the other end of the wires to the buttons on the fret bar and then you can just plays the fret bar back in and just tag glue the USB circuit board into the guitar and then just connect the remaining wires to the strings and the whamy board. And then I just cut in a notch and the casing for the USB cord and then just put everything back together. And if you hooked it up to your computer it should recognize and this is what it looks like appearing game play with frets on fire. And if it does not work then you may need to go back and re-solve and it is fun to play around with but it takes a while to build. That is it for this tutorial for more, go to tinkernut.com.
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