First off, Hi im new here. Im from Australia and have had my 360 for about 12 months now! havent done anything yet to it but within a month hopefully some stuff will occur. Just got it back after M$ fixed my RROD. FIrst thing i did was to crack her open and have a look. (woops there goes warranty). All M$ seem to do is add a new GPU heatsink. Thanks to everyone on thins site, its great and i have learnt heaps. ..

anyways on to the subject at hand- I got GH3 the other day with the wireless guitar. What i want to do if its possible is add some leds. But not just any leds! I want to cut a window in the guitar body and have different colour leds behind it. What i want to do though is rig it up so that when the green button is pushed- green leds come on, when the red is pushed-red leds come on etc.

Can this be done? If so how tricky is it? Anyone out there done this? btw i searched for ages and couldnt find a topic on this so i posted a new thread- I hope i am in the right.

If this cant be done can star powered leds be put in? I I know you can hook them into the accelerometre but this will only turn them on not off right? As its not the guitar that is processing when star power is on or off? I am probably wrong there though !!

Thanks everyone in advance

The guitar doesn't actually know if you have enabled star power. Everything else you described is technically possible, it will just require more work than simply adding LEDs, and you'll also probably want to use an additional power source. You can make a little box to hold a couple AAs or something.

The only way I could see star powered LED's working is if you hooked them up to the accelerometer and ran them through a timer. So say when you tilt the guitar up for star power, the LED's will light up for a certain amount of time, then shut off. Problem is, they'll light up every time you tilt the guitar, whether you have star power or not.

The problem there is the Accelerometer is a really touchy thing and it'll kick off when the Guitar is just tapped, unless ya were to use at least a couple axis from the thing, which ends up being more of a pain. It's far easier to use another mechanical tilt sensor for that, along with a timer circuit, but ya still have the same issues of it activating whenever the guitar is tilted. Furthermore since it's Wireless, you only have 3v max to play with for LEDs and without using some external power source or sticking another battery pack in there to power the LEDs your color choices are limited, since Blue, White and some Green aren't going to work for long or at all.

As for making certain colors light up when the button is pushed, that's doable, but a huge mess as well.

thanks for the replies everyone!

RDC- you say it is possible but messy- how messy we talking here ... lol..
As for LEDs- can i not just add them and run them at the lower voltage of 3v? or will they just not light?
How long can i expect the batteries to last if i put the lights in there?

thanks to everyone in this community

Some colors of LED aren't going to light up run from 3v, or only light up enough, and as soon as that 3v drops (which it will before long) the LEDs aren't going to light anymore, but the ones that work on a lower voltage still will, hence needing to power them from an external source or install another battery pack with at least 4.5v to drive them. That part of it's not so bad, plenty or room to add in a 3 x AA battery pack with a cover. Another method ya could use would be to install a DC-DC converter and use it to drive the LEDs.

Making the SP tilt timer isn't a big deal, I've done it before on the X-plorer Guitar, but in that instance ya have 5v to work with.




As for making the LEDs light when a button is pressed, that's where it gets complicated, doable, but a pain. You can either sever half or each fret buttons contacts and setup the other half as a switch to activate the LEDs. That comes with increasing the chances that pressing a button may not register in game, since only half of the contact area is available for the button pressing after doing that, plus it's some right fine trace cutting and soldering that needs to be done to pull that off without ruining the fret board. that may not even be entirely possible with the GHIII controller since the fret board is a little different, I haven't looked that much into that one exactly, but figured it out on the X-plorer controller and it's just a mess there. The other option is to use some type of magnet and magnetic switch that will 'sense' which button is pressed and be the trigger to activate each color LED. The fun ya run into there is to find something small enough to do the job as well as sensitive enough to work in the few millimeters of distance allowed to register the difference between an untouched button and a pressed one. You could install another set of switches to do the job, but then ya change the way the thing feels and run the risk of one set of buttons or the other possibly not working since getting them both to activate at the same time is a mess of it's own, something that has to be dealt with if a magnetic switch is used also.

I think you should try to contact this dude.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvOuh_XYB5c...maxconsole.net/

I know it's not the same thing you're planning on, but it's kind of the same concept, and it looks totally awesome.

Thanks RDC- more good advice from you
So last night i though i may as well have a play around testing for different voltages etc..
While i was in there i decided i would change the ROL to red and also added some strum leds.
What i discovered was that when you strum either up or down one of the pins goes low,
Then i just wired up 2 white leds to the positive form the batteries in parallel with the ground wire
soldered to the down/up switches pin. So when you strum it completed the circuit and the lights come on.
THe lights are mounted at either end of the strum button and look ok IMO... and yes i know that they are not at full brightness but oh well ..its a start.

I should have taken pics but i didnt so will when i open it up next time...

another question RDC- i was looking around in the fretboard and was wondering whether you could just attach leds to the already existing traces/wires in there? i dont know whether when you press the button they go low or high but say they go high..... Have all the leds permanently grounded then when the button is pushed it feeds them ~3V and they light or am i missing something?



VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV
yeah dude thats totally sick- will ask him how he did it! cheers for the link

Those connections aren't really designed to source/sink any current that I'm aware of, you're liable to really mess the main IC up doing it that way, or maybe not, your choice there.

The fret board is the same as the plectrum really, it's in the same matrix setup as any other button on the Guitar, except Start and Guide. The Wireless Guitar is the exact same layout as the Wireless 'Matrix' controller as far as what pin goes where, it's just a slightly stripped down version of it, but I still wouldn't have the LEDs wired up the way you do because of what may happen to the main IC.

RDC- are you saying the way i wired my two strum leds may be bad? or the way i was talking about wiring the other ones is a bad idea?

Btw what is an IC *feeling really stupid now* lol...

Both, I wouldn't have it wired how ya do now and wouldn't go ahead with anything more along that line, but that's not my Guitar either.

IC - Intergrated Circuit, tens, hundreds, thousands even millions of Transistors and other components all grouped together in a nice neat little package to do much more than the individual components by themselves and taking up a significant fraction of the space. Like the CPU in your computer, millions of Transistors in that tiny little package there. The crap side to them is if even 1 of the hundreds or millions takes a crap the whole thing then becomes pretty useless in most cases.

TutGet

Though this one is cooler..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYl2bOOZ_Pw

Gut Pictures here (2nd post):
http://www.scorehero.com/forum/viewtopic.p...sc&start=15