This might be a bit complicated, but I was wondering if the kit could be used to analize signals from a guitar or from the different stages of an guitar amp, and send the data to the computer to be analized and displayed as a wave form.

The idea behind this came to me because I am trying to build a vacuum tube guitar amp. It would be nice to send a signal to the amp and then see it on its different stages, how it gets amplified, distorted so on.

So I have a few questions regarding the Kit part of the project alone: 1) How can the microcontroller be used to convert a signal (voltage change?) to digital? in other words how can I use the Microcontroller to read the signal? 2) How can I do this if what we are reading (tube amps) ar high voltage? some amps are 600V DC, I know there are probes that will x/10 the signal, but still 60VDC might be too much. 3) can the microcontroller read AC signals?

I know audio frequenzies are low for example the A note is 440 hz if I remember correctly, however there are noise freqs on the signal I assume.

Thanks Luis

Hey Luis,

Nice to see someone else on here that is interested music electronics (if you ask me the vacum tube is THE coolest electronic component EVER!) I recently completed my own tube amp. (cloned a Marshall Plexi model from 1967, I'm a fan of AC/DC and it complitely nails that tone. :)..50W is loud as hell!.....which is nice.) From my experience working with amps you should probably get a signal generator (even a software based free one will do, and a decent oscilloscope.....for the plate voltage measurements always use a multimeter.....always! even if you are checking for 50/60Hz hum. An oscilloscope is useful for the signal path checks and is usefull when looking at the distortion characteristics if you make your amp to have distortion. A really nusefull poject for the MCU in the nedkit would be a bias current meter that works by measuring the voltage across a 1 ohm resistor, 200mV would be quite a high reading across the resistor so the MCU shouldnt get fried if something doesn't go terribly wrong. BTW I got my kit today......there will be no sleeping tonight :)

May I add: proud to be a n00b ;)

Ok--if you look at the code for the temp probe that shows how to read analog into the uC. What I need help with is outputting a nice signal from the chip. I have processed the guitar sig but I need to get that binary into analog. I made a 4bit summing dac but it sucked.

Hi norby31,

I think you already found it, but I'm mentioning it here for others who might stumble onto this thread. The folks on this pwm for dac thread have made quite a bit of headway on getting an analog output from the microcontroller using PWM and a little bit of analog filtering.

Humberto