Reactive Drums - The Final Product

These are the drums as they appeared tonight at the Indianapolis Museum of Art Winter Solstice Celebration.  The weather was full on suck, but the drums still consistently drew a crowd.  Four of us from Dorkbot Indy made the project happen, +Tom Streit and +Jordan Munson did the heavy lifting getting the drum shells made, heads mounted, and everything looking cool. +Brandon Ferguson wrote all the code, and I put the electronics together.

Short Test Video of Reactive Drum Project

This is a short test of the reactive drums project I've been working on the past month with three other guys from Dorkbot Indy.  Tom and Jordan built the drums, Brandon wrote the code, and I designed and built all the electronics.  We made four drums from 12 inches in diameter to 24 inches and they were all delivered to the Indianapolis Museum of Art this week.

Drum Electronics

This is a start on electronics for my drum.  I use an Arduino clone, an Adafruit PWM board, and a piezoelectric sensor to implement the lights.  The software is really straight forward right now, just implementing what is in effect a VU meter.

If you look carefully at the video, you can see a difference in the circuit's reaction between the beginning and the end of the video.  Right now I've just got the piezo stuck to the drum head with electrical tape.  After playing for a while, the sensor looses some of it's connection to the head, and the sensitivity goes down.

First Hand Made Drum

This is video of me playing my first hand made drum - put together out of scrap laying around the shop.  The drum sounds good, I just suck as a drummer.

Compressed Air Rocket Launcher

For my son's birthday I built this launcher using plans from Make:Projects.  One shot from our driveway went about 150 feet up.  I was pretty surprised.  Tomorrow we take it to the park to see what she's really got.

Updated Linear Actuator

This is the latest refinement of my linear actuator project.  I had some reliability issues with the old design, so I added deep groove ball bearings to the shaft.  It's now ready for prime time, and was installed in the robot last weekend.

Mock-up of robot arm

I spent about two hours putting together this mock-up of an arm for a boxing robot.  I built it to figure out the geometry required to get the motion I was after, while keeping with one degree of freedom.  It's built with a standard hobby servo and my arduino running the servo library.  the forearm is 6.5 inches, and it's on scale for a 45 inch tall robot.