Robot plays Rockband on the iPhone with Simulated Fingers

Rockband is lots of fun. What can be more fun than rocking out with Rockband on your iPhone? Well the answer is making a robot that is better than you at it! This robot uses sensors to look for the blips streaming down the screen and cool simulated fingers to jam on the touchscreen.  The Arduino code is available so you can make your own iPhone Rockband robot.

Thanks for the tip about this cool Make post John!

"The iPhone touch screen isn’t like most PDAs. It uses a capacitive touch screen. More info about that HERE. It would seem that the iPhone is looking for a finger sized touch, from living flesh. According to the link, the screen actually looks for changes in electrical current. I had some conductive foam laying around, its usually used for shipping sensitive electronics. If I put my finger behind the foam and pressed on the iphone screen, it works. If I used something non conductive, like a plastic pen, the foam would do nothing to the screen. My solution to this was to put thin copper wires into the foam (I also used these wires to attach the foam to the servos) the other end of the wires were wrapped around the handle of an exacto knife. When the Robot is playing the game I touch the handle of the exacto and the robot fingers are able to press the screen."