So you have a MIDI-enabled drum pad, an Arduino and an LED strip and want to make it sparkle when you hit the crash? You've come to the right place!
The data flow in this project is as follows:
Drum pad -> Host computer (Processing sketch) -> Arduino -> RGB LED strip
During development, I used these main components:
- Millenium MD90 Mobile Drum
- Any computer with two free USB ports (and two USB-A to USB-B cables)
- Arduino Mega 2560 R3
- Adafruit NeoPixel Digital RGBW LED Strip - Black PCB 60 LED/m (4 meters)
I recommend reading and following the Adafruit NeoPixel Überguide. This means that some additional basic electric components are required:
- A power supply with 5 V output with at least 10 A -> 50 W (but ideally 20 A -> 100 W) output
- A DC power supply plug adapter
- A breadboard
- A handful of jumper wires
- A 330 Ohm and a 100k Ohm resistor
- A 1000 uF capacitor
- Follow the Adafruit guide(s) to set up the power and data connections for the Arduino and the LED strip.
- Install Processing 3.5.x and the Arduino IDE 2.0 on the host computer.
- Connect the Arduino to the host computer.
- (You might want to try some basic tests as described in the Adafruit guides at this point.)
- Open the two sketches in this repository with the respective IDEs.
- Install the required libraries through each IDE (see top of the respective main file).
- Use the Arduino IDE to identify the COM port that your Arduino landed on. Change the Processing sketch to use that COM port in
setup().
If you are using a different drum pad (or other MIDI device), uncomment MidiBus.list() in the Processing sketch and find your device in the console output.
Change an existing Instrument class or create a new one for your device.
As it stands, the different Instrument implementations are really boring. However, the architecture is flexible and extensible: You can add new instruments seamlessly, and for more complex visualizations, some computation may also happen on the host computer instead.