shinyhappyrainbows

Kind of the other inspiration for the Robo-Drums, I've also been thinking about a MIDI Master Clock that started with the WAY TOO AMBITIOUS idea of a central 2-way, DINsync-MIDI-And-Back Master Clock, that I thought would be cool to add tap-tempo to. (Draws HUGE breath after that mouthful!) I dug out one of my Wio Terminal micros, promptly killed it on a distraction, dug out the other and started developing this concept. The left and centre buttons will probably have a gang reserved for straight switching of start/stop and pattern-select, as well as for triggering to Wio Term to do MIDI.sendStart/MIDI.sendStop (left) and MIDI.programChange. (Center.) The right button will be the tap-tempo button. The toggle switches will select normally-open/closed modes for the analogue button-out function. On the tap tempo stuff, I got to thinking about " Kilroy's Blues " •1 , a song I wrote back in the mid "noughties," and how it would be cool to "pedal" ...

With my Robo-Drums, Wristy-Bot, the simpler parts of the system have come together quicker and easier than I'd have expected in my wildest dreams. Not so much the Hat-Bot frame. Hat-Bot frame, still to be drilled, still requiring an array of parts. Spar on lower left is where the stick mech will be fitted, 1 either side. The servo-motor assembly will be in the center of the top beam. The picture above is the 3D render of the frame I'm building from aluminium parts of some discarded gym equipment, left on hard rubbish a few years back. The bottom cymbal will rest on pad in the middle of the bottom rail. The top cymbal will hang from an M6 bright steel rod that will run through the centre holes at the bottom and top and be lifted and dropped via motor on top of the frame. I'd been thinking of using a car door lock motor, like with Stick-Bot and Kick-Bot, but it may not have enough thrust to quickly operate a heavy object like a cymbal, its shaft clamp and shaft. There...

Currently on the printer... (Yeah, now long finished, like a day or two ago as I finish this post. I'm still waiting for another car door motor to arrive from the seller, but the mech for stick bot, with little more than a finger flick, makes a really nice, sharp, toppy "CRACK" on my piccolo wood snare. (I love that snare, so toppy and eighties! Yet full bodied. Tin snares suck.) I've designed this so that it'd be possible to CNC out of wood or aluminim, with plenty of mount holes for brackets or poles. No thingiverse entry yet, but I'll get that up as I organise the design and generalise mounting hardwares to suit a range of drums and cymbals. Here's a demo vid... The firmware will have provision for treating MIDI Snare 1 and 2 (or combos of tom or hi-hat notes, depending on application) as left or right stick, as well as a protocol for detecting if a left ot right hat hit was in close enough proximity that a human drummer wouldn't be able to ...

In my collections of hard rubbish, I've scored Pearl drum stools, a high hat cymbal stand with pedals and, to my surprise, a kick drum pedal. The pedal that came with my dp Percussion "kiddie" kit is not something I want to remove springs from and add brackets to, so finding the spare, somewhat shitty, sacrificial pedal amongst my digital kit bits (packed awy to save space) was an absolute bonus. So I've started some basic proof testing. Particularly, will the cheap actuators I'm considering for Wrist-Bot actually drive a kick drum? Yes, as this toob proves... Yeah, not a resounding thump, but the battery I used for this test is flat as a pancake. At 13.8 volts, a car battery's full charged voltage, and with a slightly longer lever at attached between the actuator and the beater shaft, as well as a moving the beater a little closer at start postion to the drum skin and having it on a shorter arm, the maximum velocity should be enough noise for my half-gara...

Joplin notebook, where have you been all my life? OMG! Free Open Source Software for the win again! joplinapp.org I've always just kept notes in Apple Notes but it gets to a point where it becomes a shitfight to keep track of what's where very quickly as your separate notes add up. The heirarchy of Joplin's notes makes organising notes a combined nerdgasm of organisation and project management. It's fucking brilliant! Notebooks are "infinitely" stackable. You can have notebooks all the way down, Mr Sagan! Notebooks within notebooks within notebooks... You can have todo lists, or notes. You have a markdown editor (left side of actual note panel) or just direct editing (the right side only, at full width) in simple, but rich formatting. It's not twice as good as Apple Notes, it's not 20 times as good, it's orders of magnitude more useful and powerful! And it's still simple to use. Also, Evernote fans might recognise some uncanny similar...

Rocket Chess Rules Rocket chess set pieces - source, the web. The perfect set to play this variation of Chess with. Roll a die before every move. The value of the roll is the fuel you have to cross space, 1 to 6 squares of legal chess move for one of your pieces. Roll a 3, you can move a pawn 2 squares, a king 1 square or a rook, knight bishop or queen 3 squares and no further. If you can’t move a single piece to the total value of a role, the leftover is added to the leftover column, the moves are added to the distance column. At the end of the game, the winner gets their leftovers halved and both players divide distance by total (distance plus leftover) for an efficiency percentage. The greater efficiency is the actual winner.