LARS, the Looping Automated Rhythm Station #ArtTuesday #RaspberryPi @xythobuz
For the recent birthday party, Kauzerei had the great idea to build a DIY drum machine as a present, to allow them to play the bass without having to gather a jam session group. He recruited Thomas Buck for electronics design brainstorming and to write the firmware.
The drum body consists of a tambourine with a 3D printed frame attached, with three hand-wound solenoids mounted on there. The positioning and different hammers create some (slightly) differing sounds.
The electronics are made with a Raspberry Pi Pico (or Pico W in this case, although WiFi or BT are not used yet). This keeps the future option of a USB Midi input open.
The user interface consists of four buttons, each with an LED above, and a clickable rotary encoder, as well as a power switch and an 128×64 SSD1306 OLED display. To drive the solenoids, three step-up converters create ~16V from the single Li-Ion 18650 cell. Their output is then switched to the solenoids using MOSFETs. A small TP4056 module handles recharging the battery.
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