Developer Chris Riebschlager and the people at Dimensional Innovations have created a playable Raspberry Pi guitar that stands at 12 feet (3.6 metres) tall for the Boulevardia music festival.

The body of the guitar is made out of MDF wood with steel supports. The exterior was given some paint to look more authentic and decals of the breweries serving beer at the festival were added for decoration.

Cavities inside of the build hold the all important electronics; A Raspberry Pi is at the centre of everything, but a Bare Conductive touch board is what makes it work. This board is connected to the 16-gauge galvanised wire which acts as the strings.

Strum the guitar at your leisure and the Pi will play a WAV file depending on which strings were played.

There is also an array of arcade buttons on the side of the build that will play a cord on a press. A to G notes in both major and minor are present there.

Some problems were encountered in the build, such as the Raspberry Pi audio jack being abandoned for HDMI as the audio out, apparently due to the jack adding unwanted noise.

You can see more pictures of this build in the Riebschlager’s Medium post where he goes into more details about the process.

Make sure you also check out the video below for a quick time lapse of the build, and this third video of the guitar being played on its side so you can properly appreciate how big it is.

[Sources – hackster.io Via Chris Riebschlager | Dimensional Innovations]