Echo
Drum
Echo Drum is a physical drum set that is designed to provide people with new ways of playing drums without actually using a drum set but can also play with drums in a physical and interactive way. Our goal for the Echo Drum is to give an interesting experience of playing the drum with your friends or families and also make more people have fun with music in an innovative way. We decide to call it Echo Drum because it is the combination of our name pronunciation and also we want to create the echo that inspires more people to enjoy playing with our drum.
Tools
Arduino Nano 33
Garage Band
Physical Fabrication
MIDIUSB
Video Production
Process
Arduino MIDI & Drum Library
Instead of using speaker as sound output, we decided to connect our Arduino to the garageband to make the sound. Also, one advantage of garageband is that once you change the output of the instrument, you can get different sound like piano, guitar etc. Then we check many examples and found out the way Arduino board connected to garageband is using the MIDI input and the once the garageband sense the MIDI input, we can play the garageband in physical way.
Define Note to Drum
For the Echo Drum, I hope to make it have 10 sounds based on different drum part and also for interaction, and I design ten different moving ways including clap hands and tap the feet.
Connection Test
Our next step was replace the push button with metal hand model which we hope to connect them with gloves to make the act of clap hand as the button on state. Our initial idea was to connect three wires behind each metal board and when two hands clap, there would be only one circuit triggered.
The sound worked at first. However, we found when we are using metal board to make gloves, all the circuit connected with the metal will close and there will be three sounds come out at the same time. We've tried to read the button bit to read the action and control different situation, but we didn't figure out after several trials. So we finally decided to simplify our hand interaction and sadly delete three sounds. But we still hope know how to fix out the problem and revise our drum when we know more about Arduino.
Drum Box Making
The materials we were using for our drum are thickening foam boards which we've made tapping test and to make the box not broken while tapping, we cut wood boards to strengthening the inside of our box. We also dig holes to make wires able to go through the box and the aim we design the box is also to make people who play the box easy to put the gloves and the footpad into the box and carry it easily.
Play Test
