Gearfuse

Party on, Wayne! Look, if you don’t have an Arduino by now, I have no idea what’s wrong with you. Grab one and then plunk down some cash for this Piezo Drum Kit from Spikenzie Labs. It’s a mere $18.95 and will allow you to easily hook up piezoelectronic sensors to your board and start drumming with any tangible surface area. Your desk? Drum kit. Your 8-month-old child? Drum kit. That bag of cocaine you picked up in the alleyway last night? Drum kit! The possibilities are endless, as long as you don’t suck at percussion.

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When a father makes a gadget for his unborn son, that’s true dedication. Corey Menscher designed and built the Kickbee for his pregnant wife. The baby kicks her stomach, a piezo sensor reads it and another module twitters the response for all to see. Can you guess what microcontroller is used to control all of this? Take a guess.

Yup. The Arduino. Specifically, an Arduino Mini with a Bluesmirf Bluetooth module. I’m no Twitter fan but this is badass.

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This project kit is only meant to help get you started but it’s not short on features. If you’ve wanted to create your own SynthAxe-like percussion instrument, just like Futureman from Bela Fleck and the Flecktones did, then this is a great place to start. You’ll need to add your own piezo sensors to use as triggers and can even use audio input to control it.

How does it all work? Glad you asked:

The Tapdrum kit coverts 8 analog inputs to assignable MIDI notes via an Atmel 89S8252. The inputs are intended to be used with piezo sensors (optional with kit) but could foreseeably use a number of different sensor input types, even audio as Deviantsynth suggests.

From the video, this looks like an absolute blast. Don’t feel like building your own? Use a software-based drum machine.

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