Stub Hero: Phase II
So I made it to Radio Shack and bought some jacks and plugs and switches. The jacks and plugs are standard 1/8″ deallies. Exactly like yer newfangled Walkman has. Here’s how they came out:
I was more concerned with the switch, and basically took a gamble. I bought a Submini Lever Switch, a Roller Lever Switch, and a pack of 4 Momentary?Pushbutton Switches.
For the first prototype, I slapped together some trim I had laying around, cardboard from the day’s Tanga shipment, and the Roller Lever Switch. I made a rough cavity in the trim for the switch to sit in, then taped it all together. Ghetto fabulous.
Here’s the side-view:
And from the top, with the cardboard lever pulled away:
Surprisingly, it worked like a champ. However, since some Bunker Party bonehead erased my GH saves, I was forced to test with the first five tracks. “Infected” again. On medium this time. To prove that it worked, I went through the entire song whilst holding the camera in my strum hand. Before I knew it, I had 900 megs of video of my foot hitting a switch. Mesmerizing.
?Here’s a preview:
The problem is, after a single song, my foot/calve really started to ache. This could be a manifestation of my colossal wussiness, or maybe this ain’t the best way to deal with the problem.
So… now that prototype I is complete and semi-successful, I will entertain the weirder ideas. These range from tongue-clickers, voice activation, some kind of thigh-master-like doo-dah, and… others… too horrific and terrible to describe.
And, what about the Whammy? Right now I’m thinking a something similar to how the mercury switch works for Star Power, but for any movement that the guitar experiences in general. In other words, you shake the guitar, and that invokes the whammy response. (The existing mercury switch would have to be disabled, and Star power activated solely by a relocated start button.) This could be as simple as an almost frictionless potentiometer with a small weight on it (if that even exists), to a full-blown accelerometer like the Wiimote has. (Which is probably way out of scope of this project.)
If you’ve got any ideas, feel free to email them or share in the comments!
