Functionality Functionally, I’m really happy with how my project turned out.  It syncs up seamlessly with any music software that accepts MIDI ins, and can transmit a variety of easy-to-change MIDI signals.  The response time is also super quick – unnoticeable.  Even when two pads are being struck at the same time, the Koala 1…

Inspiration I really like making music in Ableton Live.  I’ve wanted to buy some MIDI drum pads for a while to use when making music, but I haven’t been able to justify the cost.  So, I decided to make my own (hopefully for a fraction of the cost). When I began work on the MIDI…

I spent most of week trying to figure out what was wrong with my original code.  Like I was talking about in my last post, whenever I strike one of the drum pads, the light will either stay on, or flash on and off at the rate that my void loop() takes to cycle.  What…

This week my Teensy arrived.  If you’re not familiar, the Teensy is an Arduino Powered microcontroller.  It’s pretty cheap, at only $19.80, and it has quite a few perks.  It has 34 I/O pins, and they’re all interruptable!  If you’re not familiar, interrupts are a way of cutting back on the computations that your microcontroller…

My Teensy just arrived in the mail today!  This will allow be to start doing some of the coding that will be included in my final project.  The Teensy uses the mBed platform for coding, so I may need to freshen up on the syntax for this platform, but I’m pretty confident I’ll be able…

With a heavy load for senior design and mechatronics in March, I’ve fallen behind on my posts.  Here are the top 5 constraints for my MIDI drum pad.  Sensor Overlap My MIDI drum pad uses a number of piezoelectric sensors to detect when the drum pads are struck. These sensors are moderately sensitive – enough…

This inspiration for my project was the Rock Band drum set.  I read that these drum sets can be used for a bunch of different projects pretty easily, and have quite a few decent piezoelectric sensors inside.  So, to start off, I disassembled the drum set to see what all was inside.     The…

For my project, I’ll be designing a MIDI drum pad.  MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is just a standard of connectors, digital interfaces, and protocols that allow musical instruments to communicate with one another and computers.  My midi drum pad will be able to sense when a drum head is being hit, and transmit that…

I got the idea for my project from a few of pre-existing products that are a bit outside of my price-range: namely, the Korg Wavedrum,  Roland HandSonic, and Nord Pad.  Each of these are electronic drum pads used for music production/performance.  The price is mainly the result of internal sound-engines (much like a synthesizer) which provide…

TV Terrarium   I started CU’s Super Smash Brothers club during 2013’s spring semester.  It’s pretty well known that Super Smash Brothers players are notoriously picky about the input lag on monitors.  Three of the consoles most commonly used (the Nintendo Gamecube, Nintendo Wii, and Nintendo 64) all output video via VGA standard definition cables.  When playing…