Skogens trummor

Drum pads of the forest

Here’s a little creation I made, drum pads built into pinewood stumps. They are made for me and my sons band “The drums of the forest”, we use them to trigger sounds that we have sampled in the forest.

Skogens trummor

They are based on arduino and piezo elements to detect hits. The stumps are connected with patch cables and one of them contains the Arduino and a midi out port.

Piezos are a super simple and cheap way to measure vibrations from hits. Although they can be a bit glitchy, so I still have some experimenting and fine-tuning to do… My work is based on these instructions, although I did not use that sheild.

Skogens trummor

Oh, and I learned one important thing about c++ when programming this that had been causing me trouble in previous projects, but I never really managed to debug it until now: When measuring elapsed time – it’s not a good idea, although in c++ totally possible, to try to put the milliseconds recieved from millis() into an int, the program will melt down after about 30-something seconds when the number is too large for the signed int – you have to use the unsigned long data type for millis.