Assignment

For our first week, without any experience with CAD, we were tasked with modeling a potential final project.

As a musician, I was fascinated by the idea of building a musical instrument. I had seen a past project building an electronic, stringless ukulele, and I decided it would be cool to go one step beyond that, and build an electronic guitar.

The guitar would have some kind of capacitive touch sensor to sense where the player's fingers lie on the fret. When the user strums (some other touch sensor), the respective notes on the respective strings would be played.

I'd done something that required transforming MIDI note numbers to played piano notes in another class, and I simply made recordings of each note - I imagine the same technique could be used here.

As a stretch goal, it would be awesome to be able to plug into a speaker via aux or even play over bluetooth to a nicer speaker than whatever would be built into this electronic guitar.

After some research, I found a similar-ish product: the Misa Kitara. Instead of a touch sensor, it has buttons for each string and each fret - it looks pretty ugly, so I was hoping I could do better.
messing around
Again, I have never opened a CAD program, other than Google SketchUp in middle school. I started messing around in SolidWorks, since a lot of my mechanical engineering friends could help me out if I were to get stuck. I made this strange thing: Looked kind of cool! Maybe I'll 3D print it at some point.
design
After learning how to sketch in 2D and extrude into 3D, I started making a guitar... First, I took a picture of my acoustic guitar off of which to work, and then imported it into SolidWorks and basically copied the shape of my guitar.
After sketching it in SolidWorks, this is what it looked like. Not bad!
I then made it 3D, with a little bit of detail. Here's the (beginner's) final product!