2014: Proof Of Concept: Pickups and Pitch-Shifting

July 27, 2014: Very first proof of concept of using control voltage for pitch shifting individual pedal steel guitar strings.
First version of cycfi.com’s single string magnetic pickups (originally called Neo, later Nu) soldered into perf board.
Two separate string signals are sent to separate channels in Logic Pro.
Each channel has a pitch shifter plugin.
Potentiometers control output voltages which are read by an Arduino microcontroller.
The microcontroller translates the voltages to 14-bit MIDI control codes to adjust the pitch shifting plugins.
Soon after this proof of concept, the design for the first prototype replaced potentiometers with Hall Effect sensors and MIDI was replaced with a more powerful microcontroller’s internal ADC peripherals.