ardrum

Recently i started making my own drumset. as good e-drums are not quite affordable to me, i set out to build my own with some design goals:

• the individual drums should be sensitive to the place where they get hit
  
• i wanted the set to be able to play samples as well as to trigger and influence sound synthesis
  
• it should teach me about arduinos and other microcontrollers
  
• the sensor input should be processed in an arduino and sent to pure data
  
• it should be sort of affordable
  
• standard parts should be used whenever possible
  

i came back from work where we checked my 20 yr old piezos with an oscilloscope, they have their first peak between 8.88 and 9ms after being hit. less than 10ms latency should work. among the other drums, these piezos go into the snare, too.

parts

electronics

• arduino atmega 168
  
• plenty of piezos (i still had them and have no idea what kind they are)
  
• an analog multiplexer to expand the amount of analog arduino inputs
  
• a bunch of ethernet cables to hook the things up

hid

practice cymbals, pads and other materials

• some toms
  
• a snare
  
• da bass kick
  
• le hihat
  
• cymbals: rubber crash, grass ride et le cow
  

software

when its in a releaseable shape, consists of
- arduino sketch
- pure data patches

and of course, schematics too.