Sitar Control

A research internship at Centre d'Automatique des Systèmes, Mines ParisTech

by Jeremy Dahan, student at Mines ParisTech and member of the Trublion collective

This website is my report for my research internship at the CAS where I built a stringed musical instrument on which timbre is controled using electromagnets. A complete description can be found here

EDIT : This report was written in 2016, when I was a member of the Trublion collective and a Student of Mines-ParisTech


  1. Introduction
  2. Landscape of augmented instruments
  3. Design choices for the instrument
    1. General geometry
    2. Choosing the actuator
    3. Choosing the sensor
    4. Microcontroller, amplifier and woodworking
    5. Summary of the design
  4. Engineering a magnetic scanner
    1. Design
    2. Results
  5. Controlling the instrument
    1. State-sensor algorithm
    2. Dynamics of the system
    3. Code architecture and first control
    4. Linearising the actuators
  6. Discussion : Compairing with other setups
  7. Conclusion and future work
  8. About this website

About this website

This report was written in a variant of Markdown (MD), a lightweight markup language that can be easily read without an interpreter. We used the typora editor for writting.

The website also incorporates code blocks with syntax highlighting using prism; the CSS style is a slightly modified version of Pixyll; the math formulae use MathJax and the overall document conversion is made via pandoc; and citations use Bibcite coupled with BibTex.

The 3D vector fields are drawn using a custom script that leverages the plotly library.

The webserver uses node and the express webserver framework for routing, and a few custom bash scripts have been written to generate the files automatically.

In the open-source spirit, the code for this report is available on the GitHub repository of the project.