So I've come to learn that I'm not the only former musician that's now interested in electronics. Maybe it's the way the brain is wired, but it seems that if you now how to play the guitar or drums, you have a natural inclination to take up electronics and create musical instruments or modify what you've got. Once I started learning how to program PIC microchips, I found some websites showing how to make electronic drum triggers, and I knew i had to try my hand at it. I'm writing this in hopes that someone can glean some knowledge from my experience, as I have done from many other websites.
This project uses the PIC16F690 from Microchip to process the signals from the electronic drums, and sends the signal to a PC via serial port. This could be modified to send a MIDI signal instead of serial port signal, or could be interfaced to the PC via USB with the 18F4550, but I'll leave that for another day. I originally planned to make two drums on a single platform. The PIC16F690 has eleven analog-to-digital (A2D) channels, and it's just not part of my cheap nature to waste something, so I decided to add eight more triggers in the form of an octave keyboard. Each trigger is sampled by the PIC16F690. Once a strike is detected the 16F690 sends two bytes to the PC (1: the channel number and 2: the intensity of the strike - from 1 to 255). I wrote a program in C# that processes these signals and plays a .wav file mapped to the trigger at a volume that corresponds to the force of the strike.
The finished project looks like this:
Let's get started with Step 1 - putting the piezo sensors together.
In order to keep this manageable, I'm going to break this project down into a couple of steps:
Step 1 - Building piezo sensors - the heart of the sensor - transforms vibrations from the drum strike into voltage which varies based on the intensity
Step 2 - Building drums - my design uses gum rubber epoxied to thin plywood
Step 3 - Building the case - holds the drums and electronics, also isolates the drums from each other - UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Step 4 - 16F690 firmware description - UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Step 5 - Circuit design - UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Step 6 - Putting it all together - UNDER CONSTRUCTION
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