As a project for term 1 (Winter 2008) of the engineering program we had to design a product to solve a problem- any problem. Many members of my group were musicians, so we set out to design a device that would turn sheet music without the musician having to take their hands off their instrument. We came up with an incredible number of ideas and eventually settled on a design which involved an electromagnet(solenoid), a rotating arm, an Arduino microcontroller and a foot pedal. Paper clips would be placed on each page to turn through before operation. Pushing the button on the foot pedal would cause the solenoid to turn on (grabbing the next paper clip), rotate the arm (turning the page), deactivate the solenoid (letting go of the page) and turn the arm back. This worked fairly well, but occasionally multiple pages would get turned. To prevent this we added a servo motor and an arm to the bottom of the device. This would hold the pages down when necessary.

Here is a video of our device in action:

Some photos can be found in "Read More".

Here are some more images showing the page turner in detail:

My main responsibilities were the programming and circuit design.
The other team members were:
Dan Li - Media/Drafting
Denis Tahir - Project Leader
Kyle King - Research
Lianfeng Li - Documentation
Zhao Xiang Wang - General Assistant

Everyone did their part and the project was a lot of fun.