Electronic Drum Kit

• 

  Our overall completed project

• 

  Our breadboard circuit

Inspiration

Drumming is quite a difficult skill to learn. It requires a large, expensive drum kit which will have a range of parts, and is also quite loud and can be disruptive to do at home. Learning to play may not be accessible to everyone, so we proposed an alternative to this which will take up very little space and is made in a lightweight fashion: an electronic drumming set which uses card/cardboard as its main structure. It is mean to be easy to use and assemble.

What it does:

This drum kit uses pressure plates to simulate an actual drum kit, and plays the sound through an Arduino micro-processor and a speaker.

How we built it:

We used an Arduino Uno to play the sound and an Ethernet shield to connect a microSD card which has the sounds stored. We also amplified the sound using an LM386 audio amplifier. The interface between the microSD and the speaker were done using the TMRpcm/SimpleSDAudio libraries

Challenges we ran into:

Our project is currently incomplete due to issues when it came to using the drum sounds from the microSD card in order to play in the speaker, so we were unable to get drum sounds playing in response.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to create a suitable audio player which reacts to a pressure plate(push button) and can simulate sounds in response (tones from Arduino library), and constructed a suitable pressure plate from a solder-able breadboard and card (which we would then solder once we are past the prototyping stage).

What we learned

We learnt how to use an audio amplifier in conjunction with a speaker and a range of Arduino techniques.

What's next for Hackathon - Electronic Drum Kit

Once we fix the issues with the microSD interface, we would solder the pressure plates and add them into the circuit to replace the temporary push pins we had .Then we would like to create a foot pedal that would be cheap to produce but strong enough to use consistently, and to find a new material for the drums which is more durable but is still quite cheap/recyclable.

Built With

• arduino
• c++