Finally Your Air Drumming Has An Outlet

Two engineering students are hard at work on this air drum which they hope will help disabled people and people in nursing homes. Though, we think it just looks fun!

Each board is its own module consisting of the electronics and 3D printed cases. The modules each contain an arduino mini, IR sensor, and LEDs. They share power, audio, and communicate with an i2c bus. Two modules are special, one holds the power system and the other a Raspberry Pi. The units can be put together in different configurations. Finally, they are capped with speaker units.

The demo shown in the video, which you can see after the break, looks fun. The response time is pretty fast and it looks like you can measure all sorts of parameters. This can then be translated into different velocities, pitches, and instruments. It’s somewhere between a theremin and a drum kit, very cool.

8 thoughts on “Finally Your Air Drumming Has An Outlet

  1. This has to be the dumbest thing I’ve seen…
    Music plays and lights flash when he moves his hand by them but there’s no correlation between the two. He takes his hands away and it doesn’t affect the music, just the lights. He’s NOT manipulating drums by waving his hands so what’s the purpose? Dumb.

    1. Exactly! I can make this being half asleep. It’s just a bunch of photo sensors that change the corresponding leds. It’s not controlling the music whatsoever although adding music beats is a breeze using the audio module that plays off the sd card. Students really work their mouths more than their brains. Go fool someone else

  2. cool project, unfortunately, this article here only shows the worst video of the 3 from the project page.
    And that video made me very “confused”, vertical… horizontal… make up your mind or at least try some editing software was the only thing that gone through my mind. In other words, the video in itself becomes very distracting and does not really promote the project in a positive way. A pity because it’s really fun stuff with some fun potential as the other two videos show in a much nicer way.

  3. Mobile phones should either come out with square 1920×1920 image sensors so they can crop the video horizontal no matter how the user holds it… or simply refuse to record video vertically as I know of no human that has their eyes arranged vertically.

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