MIDI Air Drums Let You Play Anywhere

[Maayan Migdal] wrote in to share a really cool drum kit he constructed that has one special twist – no drums at all. Using a simple MIDI device and an Arduino, his “Air Drums” look pretty sweet.

The hack makes use of a pair of garden rakes, which serve as his drum sticks. The rakes were cut down and modified to allow the addition of accelerometers and some USB cables. The left stick contains a single accelerometer for registering hi-hat hits, while the right stick is armed with a pair of the modules, which are used to trigger snare and crash symbol strikes. He modified a pair of sandals to fit better while drumming before adding a sensor to each shoe. The left sandal contains an accelerometer to register bass drum hits, while the right shoe uses a light sensor to simulate the use of a hi-hat pedal.

We think that the results are awesome, but feel free to check out the video below to see what we mean. If Guitar Hero wasn’t dead in the water on hiatus, we think this sort of setup would make a great replacement for the flimsy drum set that comes with the game.

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Singing Robot

The 4DOF CXN-I anthropomorphic robot arm in the Mechatronics Lab at FICES-UNSL (Engineering faculty, San Luis National University, Argentina) was built from scratch, and it is still a work in progress to teach and learn about mechatronics , in order to build another, more robust and precise arm in the future. When one of the students working with the device thought “hey, these motors are quite noisy, aren’t they? let’s put them to work towards something more useful”.

Armed with some guitar tabs, a robot and some noisy servos, [Guille] got the robotic arm to sing a little song raised a couple of octaves, and included it in the introduction video. Because hey, whipping a metal arm around like that is pretty mechanically strenuous, and its not all that great for the servos either.

Join us after the break for a quick video, the singing starts about 58 seconds into the show.

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Guitar Becomes An Improved Color Organ

[Charles] wanted to put some LEDs in his guitar. He also wanted individual notes to output certain colors, but he couldn’t find any projects with tone-based algorithms to convert sound into colors. After about a year of work, his ColorChord guitar was born.

Unlike every other color organ build we’ve seen, the color of a note does not relate to the absolute pitch of the note. Instead, the colors are mapped within a musical key. A I chord will always be Yellow, a IV chord will always be purple, and a V chord will always be blue. Playing in the key of C will have the LEDs output yellow, purple, and blue for a C, F and G chord, respectively.

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Beat707 LE: A Button Pad-based Standalone MIDI Sequencer

sparkfun_button_pad_midi_controller

[Guilherme] picked up a SparkFun Button Pad and was taking a closer look at the device when he noticed that it was based off the ATMega328 microcontroller. Since he loves working with MIDI, he thought that the Button Pad would make a slick yet compact standalone MIDI controller.

Since his ultimate goal was to create a completely standalone controller aside from the power plug and MIDI interface, it forced him to work quite closely with the ATMega chip. He and his partners spent a good deal of time working through some serial communications issues so as not to block the LEDs or MIDI block timer during operation. Ensuring that the Arduino doesn’t block any other functions is obviously important when you are building a MIDI timer, and it seems [Guilherme] was successful in his quest.

The MIDI controller works quite nicely as you can see in the videos below, great job!

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Robot Band Covers [Marilyn Manson]

[James] built himself a robotic band from obsolete computer parts. The band needed something to play, and [Marilyn Manson]’s Beautiful People fit the bill. While it’s not the Rock-fire Explosion, having the [James]’ band cover [Marilyn Manson] is nearly as terrifying.

[James]’ original plan was to cover Mad World, but the stepper motors were drowning out the music for that song. While trying fix the cello problem the servos started acting up and reminded him of a certain song. While it’s not faithful to the original, we really like the arrangement on this version.

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Improved FPGA Synth

A week or so ago we featured an FPGA MIDI interface. Since then the builder has gone crazy with his FPGA and revised his code to include polyphony and PWM output, and posted a polyphony demo.

In our previous coverage of the build, the synth was monophonic, and the MIDI implementation was pretty shaky. After realizing the hard work was done, [Mich] re-wrote the MIDI interpretation module to keep 8 voices in memory. Now the synth can play 16th note arpeggios at 999bpm.

The original build used 8 pins to output the audio with an R/2R ladder for a digital to analog converter. This didn’t work well with a polyphonic synth (everything was clipped or noisy), so [Mich] moved to PWM output.

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Turn Any Bluetooth Device Into A MIDI Controller

[Peter Brinkman] is working on a circuit that makes it easy to interface MIDI and Bluetooth devices. His target hardware has been a MIDI compatible keyboard and an Android phone. He was inspired to tip us off about the project after reading about yesterday’s Bluescripts project.

We’ve embedded two demo videos after the break. They show [Peter] first using this hardware to receive MIDI signals from a keyboard on his Android phone, and then he demonstrates using the phone and an on-screen musical keyboard to transmit data back to a MIDI device which generates the intended sounds.

It’s an interesting project and he’s headed down the kit-production path right now. You’ll want to browse all of his recent posts, but we especially liked reading his thoughts about simplifying the circuitry. He originally had two separate voltages running in the circuit with a level converter for data signals. After some re-conceptualization he ditched several components and improved the functionality a bit.

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