Silas Zehnder

The Auto-Otamatone

This monstrosity was created in an introductory embedded systems course. The Otamatone is a fretless toy instrument that is incredibly hard to play in tune. Due to the fretless neck, there is no good way to tell where any real notes are located.

We decided to take all our knowledge of FPGAs, MMIO, serial communication, verilog, and low-level C programming and make a self-tuning otamatone that can be controlled with a MIDI keyboard. Unnecessary? Yes. Hilarious? Yes.

Otamatone poster