MIDI Controlled Electro-mechanical Kick Drum

Hi! Using the Daisy Seed I made an electro-mechanical kick drum driven by MIDI.

I made this for Syracuse’s Maker Faire and it went really well! I wrote a blog post here (it goes into the making of it and experience at Maker Faire): https://edwarddeaver.me/blog/making-of-midi-kickdrum-maker-faire/

Here is how it works:

The Seed (using libDaisy) acts as a USB MIDI device. If it gets a midi signal it turns on and off a relay board (from Sparkfun) that turns on and off a car door lock actuator - that is attached to a modified kick drum pedal. That then hits a 20" circle art canvas.

The MIDI routing from my Arturia Keystep is done via Max. If you press note 70, it goes to the daisy. If not it goes to the OS and is delayed a bit to match the timing of the drum.

Here is a video I made from Maker Faire of people using it:

https://vimeo.com/815262283


This board (the seed) is incredible and I’m excited to make more stuff with it.

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Hey Edward!

Thank you for sharing this! It was a lot of fun reading your experience at the event!! Sounds like you had a great time.

And it’s awesome to see Daisy Seed being used for a mechatronic music project :gear:
I think Daisy has lot of potential for that type of interactive projects.

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Hi Takumi!,

Thank you! I hope from our discord convos you get back into the mechatronic projects, they’re fun.

I think the next thing I’d like to learn is interrupts. Because right now it works by using the SystemDelay function to pause for 200ms then turn off the relay. So if I could just start a timer and then interrupt the system to trigger the gpio to close the relay again after 200ms think that’d be better.

Daisy has lot of potential for that type of interactive projects.

With how much libDaisy allows you to do, and all the other methods of programming the daisy I think the system lets you focus on the physical interactivity without getting too caught up in the programming technical details (hope that makes sense).

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