Cantus X Machina
The robotic band project was the second bachelor’s project at the UAS. In it, a colleague of mine and me designed the hardware for the drum-stick handlers and wrote a MIDI compliant controller and client. With that you can upload a MIDI song to an SD card and plug it into the band controller. There you can select it on a display and the drum-kit as well as the piano play the selected song.
#all #projects #midi

Overview

This image shows the drum-stick modules connected via bowden tubes (we used bicycle break connectors) to the motors. The motors in use are car-lock motors. They use a cheap dc motor and translate the rotation into linear movement. The software for the band member - which picks out the correct MIDI data and transforms it into motor movements - runs on an arduino mega.

The band-controller is powered by an arduino mega as well. Note, that the connectors between the band controllers and the midi devices are standard midi cables. Additionally, any MIDI output device can be daisy-chained ontop of the keyboard (as we did for the midi keyboard).

Details

Neither the code nor the hardware is sufficiently cleaned up and documented at the moment for a public release. Hit me up if you’re intersted in the code or any design details.