Our friend Riley Porter, of Synthetos and TinyG fame, has posted a wonderful little project on Make: Arduino and Make: Projects. It uses an old mouse pad and a piezo sensor to create a drum pad input device. He’s even coded up the beginnings of a little game in Processing that counts your beats and records your score. An he’s included a little rocketship in the Processing sketch. Hopefully, somebody will run with this and code a game that launches the ship if you reach a certain number of beats in the allotted timeframe.
Simple Arduino Drum Pad and Game
Check out MAKE Volume 25:
MAKE Volume 25: Arduino Revolution
Give your gadgets a brain! Previously out of reach for the do-it-yourselfer, the tiny computers called microcontrollers are now so cheap and easy to use that anyone can make their stuff smart. With a microcontroller, your gadget can sense the environment, talk to the internet or other hardware, and make things happen in the real world by controlling motors, lights, or any electronic device.
6 thoughts on “Turn a mouse pad into an Ardunio-controlled drum pad”
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This is definitely a project I’ll add to my list of cool things to do with Arduino. It has two great things going for it. It is fairly easy to reproduce from scratch and is really cool! I already know I have a couple students who will be doing this later this semester.
Thanks,
Steve Dickie
Divine Child High School
arduinoeducation.com
Please let me know if your students end up working on it. Also toss me a comment on github and I will add you / your students to have write access to the repo so that you might improve the processing code :)
Again thanks for the comment.
Riley
how does it feel compared to a electric drum is it bouncy or more absorptive of the sticks.