Our first brushes with air guitars date back to the era of the Nintendo Wii and the Microsoft Kinect (does anyone remember it?), but electronics enthusiasts have never lost interest in reproducing them, at least to a certain extent. One of the most recent and interesting projects is Litar, an air guitar that uses LiDAR technology to create four virtual strings. The device is compact, and we could even say it is a portable solution...
For a while now, I have been convinced that we all have a latent musician inside, and every time one of our favorite songs plays, it's inevitable to play an air guitar to let it out for a couple of minutes. However, the air guitar doesn't have to be a temporary delusion. There are dozens of projects that seek to create instruments out of nothing, replacing strings with laser beams and digitization. This time, the Hackaday user known as Blecky published the details of his device Litar, an air guitar based on the MappyDot Plus sensor package, an optimized version of the MappyDot that he himself created.
The device consists of a total of six sensors, each with a 25-degree field of view. Three adjacent sensors define the shape of a string: the central sensor sets the distance, and the other two handle the edges (the second image helps us visualize this much better). For chords, he initially used proprietary joysticks, but ultimately ended up developing his own buttons with a PCB and Hall effect sensors, which allow vibrato.
The next step for the Litar air guitar is to incorporate MIDI support via Bluetooth, so that the user can play the guitar and use a smartphone or a laptop as a speaker, but for now it only offers a group of LEDs that light up every time the virtual strings are activated. I estimate that the amount of practice required to master Litar completely is daunting, but since it's an open source project, anyone can use it as a base and create something even better.
