8″ TomTom Drum, Sawed in Half, Made into Two Piezo Pickup Electronic Drum Pads #MusicMonday
Or how to turn this:
Into this:
By doing this:
One of the reasons that I’ve not posted anything new recently is that I’ve been learning to play the guitar, and now that I’ve got to the point where I can play some almost recognisable songs, I wanted some accompaniment and bought a cheap electronic drum kit. I took the cheaper option and got a kit that had a mesh snare and rubber toms, but then instantly regretted not getting the full mesh kit as the rubber pads make a lot more noise.
I thought I could just buy mesh replacements but the cheap ones aren’t sold separately and the easily available Roland ones are very expensive. Luckily it turns out that it’s really easy to make them at home. The actual sensor is just a simple piezo element, there’s no active electronics in the pads at all.
Very cool project. Basically anything you buy as-is can also be converted to something you want for whatever reason – all it takes is a bit of planning (or not!) and some additional tools and hardware, and likely some modifications to your original design along the way.
Make a robot friend with Adafruit’s CRICKIT – A Creative Robotics & Interactive Construction Kit. It’s an add-on to our popular Circuit Playground Express, FEATHER and other platforms to make and program robots with CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. Start controlling motors, servos, solenoids. You also get signal pins, capacitive touch sensors, a NeoPixel driver and amplified speaker output. It complements & extends your boards so you can still use all the goodies on the microcontroller, now you have a robotics playground as well.
