Summary
My team for first-year engineering projects was tasked with building a toy for 8 year olds to be featured in the annual ITLL Design Expo, we won 1st place in our category!
I was a mechanical and electrical designer on a team of 4. The design challenges were:
1. Invent a new toy for 8 year olds
2. Must be safe and educational
3. Should be unique and creative

Design Process
We started with reverse engineering a similar toy and figuring out how it worked and what kind of parts we would need to create our toy. I learned about Arduino's, basic electronics and basic programming. Then it was a matter of brainstorming, testing and prototyping to arrive at our final solution.
Solution
Our final design worked by constantly detecting the laser light from one end of the guitar coming into the photodiodes on the other end. Whenever the stream of light was broken the Arduino received a signal to play a sound.
We tested the toy with a few children. We found children prefer a variety of options for Laser-tar sounds and that it's fun to play with which makes it a successful toy and project.
Importantly, we would do a few things differently if were to build it again. 1. To improve reliability we would use more durable laser diodes and photodiodes. 2. To improve the assembly process we would create the Laser-tar body first and then fit components to the body.