A New Zealand engineer who goes by Bruce online has built a 3D-printable robotic system. It attaches to an acoustic guitar and plays it from a digital tab file. The output is real acoustic sound, not a digital or synthesized approximation. The device, called MegCell Pulse, is now funding on Kickstarter. Backers receive STL files for printing most of the components themselves, along with a parts list and assembly instructions.

The premise behind the Pulse is simple as a question and difficult as an engineering problem. What if a digital music file could control a physical instrument, producing sound with all the natural qualities of that instrument in its room? Most approaches to digital music run in the opposite direction, converting acoustic guitar recordings into digital files. The Pulse reverses that pipeline, taking a digital guitar tablature file and converting its instructions into physical finger and pick movements on a real guitar.

From tab file to acoustic sound

The Pulse attaches to the guitar body and uses two mechanical arms to replicate the movements of a human player. The fretting arm presses strings down between frets, taking the role of the guitarist’s left hand. The picking arm plucks those strings in time, taking the place of the right hand. The two arms are coordinated by gears and magnetic actuators. They draw their timing and positioning directly from a standard digital tab file. No custom programming is required for each piece of music — the system reads the tab notation as written.

What comes out of the guitar is the instrument’s own acoustic sound, shaped by its body, its strings, and the room it is in. That is meaningfully different from a synthesizer or playback system, which would produce a digitally modeled approximation. The Pulse makes the strings vibrate. The guitar amplifies those vibrations in the way it was built to.

What makes this one different

Robots playing instruments are not new, but most existing systems require significant engineering work to teach the machine a new song. The Pulse skips that by reading standard tablature. Any piece of music already encoded in tab format is immediately available without additional programming.

Bruce has also demonstrated the system as an assistive tool. It can take over fretting duties, allowing a one-handed player to produce a full performance. The human handles one mechanical role while the robot handles the other, creating a collaborative performance rather than a fully automated one.

The 3D-printable design has a practical advantage beyond accessibility: the system can be repaired and upgraded by reprinting individual components, rather than replacing a proprietary unit.

What it cannot do yet

The system does not cover the full length of most guitar fretboards, which constrains the range of music it can play. It cannot slide between frets, which rules out legato techniques and string bends. Chord strumming is also a more difficult motion to replicate than single-note picking, and the system’s handling of this technique is still developing.

Bruce acknowledges the Pulse is a work in progress. The key question now is whether the system can incorporate the small timing variations and embellishments that make a guitar performance sound human. That is the engineering problem that will determine how far the project can go.

Astronomers have released the largest-ever 2D color map of the universe. The 5.6-trillion-pixel image contains nearly 4 billion celestial objects, assembled from more than 263,000 telescope exposures taken over 2,285 nights. The release comes from the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys, led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The data is publicly available through the Legacy Survey Sky Viewer, where anyone can explore the full map.

The map is not a single photograph. It is a composite of images from multiple telescopes, including the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera at Cerro Tololo in Chile and the Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak in Arizona. Each image was taken under different atmospheric and telescope conditions. Merging those images required about a year of software development. The actual processing took eight weeks on the Perlmutter supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center in Berkeley.

A deep photo, not a distance map

A 2D sky map and a 3D map of the universe serve fundamentally different purposes. The 2D map is essentially a deep photograph. It records where galaxies and stars appear on the sky and how bright they are, across visible and near-infrared wavelengths. The 3D survey is DESI’s primary scientific mission. It adds the third dimension by measuring spectra from individual objects to determine their redshifts and therefore their distances from Earth. Before DESI can measure a galaxy’s distance, it must know the galaxy exists, and the 2D Legacy Surveys map is how it finds them.

The new map has been guiding DESI’s target selection since June 2026. Its release follows DESI completing its original five-year 3D survey in April, ahead of schedule. The instrument captured 47 million galaxies and quasars when the original target was 34 million, plus more than 20 million nearby stars.

DESI outran its own target list

The expansion of the 2D map was driven by a practical problem of success. DESI performed so efficiently that astronomers working on the project became concerned they would exhaust their pool of available targets. “It became clear we might run out of galaxies to look at and run out of sky, and we better start doing something about that,” said David Schlegel of Berkeley Lab, who works on both DESI and the Legacy Surveys.

Expanding the target catalog required expanding the 2D imaging survey it is built on, which produced the record-setting 5.6-trillion-pixel map now publicly available. With DESI continuing observations through 2028, the new catalog will support the instrument’s extended mission.

What the 3D survey has already found

The larger purpose of both the 2D and 3D maps is the study of dark energy, the unknown force that makes up roughly 70 percent of the universe and drives its accelerating expansion. DESI’s early results have produced one of the most consequential hints in modern cosmology: that dark energy may not be constant but weakening over time. If confirmed, that finding would require a fundamental revision of cosmology’s standard model.

The Legacy Surveys map is also being made available as a foundational reference for the next generation of astronomical instruments. This extends its scientific life well beyond DESI’s own mission. Astronomers and citizen scientists can access the Sky Viewer and search for rare phenomena across the nearly four billion objects now catalogued in visible form.