Need Help Putting LED Lights on Drum Pad

[LiquidOrb24]

Hi everyone,

I've currently started a project where I'm going to attempt to put an array of LED lights on a drum pad so that whenever the drum pad is hit the lights will flash to a corresponding intensity depending on how hard the drum pad is hit...Kind of like a dimming light for a night light only with pressure.

The part I'm having the most trouble with is the circuit needed to detect the pressure of the hit and to put out a certain voltage. The rest of the circuit I will be able to do, its just building the sensor part of the circuit that I think will drive me crazy.

I don't want to buy a premade pressure sensor I would rather build something simple myself but I have no idea where to start... If anyone can suggest a part or a way of approaching this problem without using a microcontroller I can research it and do the rest.

Thank you all.

 

[RODALCO]

You have to look at converting the pressure into some form of piezo electricity which can be amplified and converted into a LED out put.
Sorry i can't draw you a diagramme but you have to approach it somehow along these lines.
Good luck!
Raymond

 

[ericgibbs]

Hi liquidorb.
You could consider a simple mike, op amp, rectifier, led driver circuit.

The mike located as close a possible, to say, the base of the drum, amplify the sound, rectify the analog sound waves, then connect the 'dc' via an
amp into your led circuits.

The rectified dc signal will be approx prop to the sound intensity and freq.
You could add freq filtering circuits in the amplified analog signal to 'pick out'
freq's of interest, to boost or mute.

Regards
EricG

 

[LiquidOrb24]

Hey thanks those would both work but I might go ahead with the first idea of the piezoelectric sensor. I found one online that I might buy and just build a common emitter amplifier to boost up the gain of the signal straight into an array of LED's or something like that.

Thanks again.

 

[benwied]

could this be done with out the whole aspect of dimming according to pressure? so that each time the pad, drum was hit, the LEDs turned on momentarily(the piezo disk connecting a simple circuit)?

thanks
ben

 

[comet28024]

Easy way to accomplish this

I know this thread is long dead but I figured I would chime in for anyone who might still be looking for a solution to this problem.

There is a lot simpler solution then anyone has been talking about involving midi.

Drum pads are essentially midi triggers that run into a sampler to create the drum sounds that you hear live. The intensity (0-127 in midi) in which you hit the drums will dictate how loud the sound is.

You can translate the midi directly into lighting with very little work. When I want to accomplish this I utilize a cheap Elation light board and a DMX dimmer pack. You can set the DMX light board to receive midi on any midi channel 1-16 and it works as follows. Starting with channel 22 the light board will translate the midi signal it receives directly into DMX. So if you hit the drum that you use to trigger midi channel 22 with full intensity it translates to 127 velocity. The DMX board then converts this to full intensity on channel one of the dimmer pack (0-255 in DMX)

So basically you rig up each drum to a different channel on the dimmer and plug in the midi cables. Make sure you're receiving on the right channel and you are done.

Erick