Building a guitar trainer with embedded Rust
SMRTR summary
A software engineer wanted to learn guitar but ended up building an entire DIY electronic device instead. Frustrated by the slow pace of traditional learning, the developer created "Tuitar" - a portable guitar tuner and practice tool using an ESP32 microcontroller, custom circuit boards, and a terminal-based interface that displays notes in real-time on a tiny screen.
The project spiraled from a simple guitar tuner app into a complex embedded system that connects directly to electric guitars, featuring multiple practice modes including a "Guitar Hero" style game and song-by-song practice using MIDI files. After months of wrestling with breadboard connections, voltage regulators, and obscure firmware crashes caused by incorrect stack size configurations, the creator successfully demonstrated the device at a conference in New Zealand.
What started as a shortcut to guitar mastery became a full-blown hardware adventure, complete with custom PCBs, detailed assembly instructions, and over 100 hours of livestreamed development footage documenting every frustrating debug session and breakthrough moment.
SMRTR provides this summary for quick context. The original article belongs to lobste.rs.
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