So I decided to make my own. ’Some assembly required’ 
Has anyone else here also considered disapearing down this rabbit hole?
7 Likes
Hiiii Stuart,
I did a custom “midi” fighter years ago with a trick, it doesn’t have any Arduino or raspberry.
All the buttons are connected to a Ps2-usb gamepads and then mapped to a keyboard key with the software joytokey, then in Ableton map that keyboard key to the drum rack.
Is pretty lame but I had any notion about Arduino or coding and it worked without any kind of latency or delay on the signal.
Is so exciting to build your own stuff and if you make it thru with the Arduino I’ll ask you for advice and make a second midi device Midifighter64…
I can’t post the pictures from this old phone T_T I’ll do it tonight 
Awesome TJ. I think this will be a long journey of discovery.
Well. This is a good start. The piezo transducer is just the right size to fit under an Akai MPD pad.
Although I can already see there will be some hacking required to reject hits from neighbouring pads…but first job is to get a hit on the transducer registering with the arduino.
1 Like
Brave, very brave. I’m not sure that I know what an ideal set of pads really looks like. 
1 Like
hahaha, omg this is incredible… I cannot wait to see and hear this thing in action!
1 Like
For a long while it will look like a whole heap of spaghetti and failed experiments.
I will document the journey from a ‘random bag of bits’ through to ‘what the heck is that?’, eventually arriving at ‘actually that’s quite cool if even I do say so myself’
This may take some time
2 Likes
Hey Stuart here are the pictures and the scheme used
The problem is that I’ve never played any device before so I didn’t have in mind the distance between buttons.
5 Likes
That is one heavy duty piece of kit! I like the 1 player and 2 player buttons which reference it’s origins.
‘Hello World’ for pads.
Test #1 complete. Level up!
Please everyone, contain your excitement.
4 Likes
I’m very excited after watxhing this actually. It seems to be responding instantly!
1 Like
Test #2: Trigger sound via midi
Result - transducer hits very sensitive. The program in the Arduino is very simple for this test. It triggers a note on and a note off any time there is a signal on the Analogue input, so, until I figure out some more logic to cater for this the sound will be triggered many times in quick succession. It is useful though for hearing what happens as pressure is applied and released on the transducer, and how sensitive it is.
This test shows it could actually now become a thing that does actual things!
3 Likes
Test #3: Add code which measures the transients of each stroke and only triggers when peak velocity has been measured. It also measures a minimum time between hits so that doubled notes are minimised. The code is from the public domain and hacked to suit my purposes.
This is a really interesting exercise as it made me realise that the software detecting a pad hit has a big effect on the sensitivity. Sure the pad mechanism is important but it will only ever be as good as the method the pad software uses to detect the hits. I suspect that not all pad detection algorithms are created equal!
4 Likes
Very interesting indeed. I think this also relates to for example the roli blocks,instrument and other controllers that use alternative ways of detecting hits. It think that because they’re focused on more than just percussion it will get harder and harder to write an algorithm thats compatible with all use cases.
My brief experiments revealed to me some tweaking possibilities which at the moment engineers preset into devices to make them easy to use. Things that I hadn’t considered before.
Your review on the Nektar controller is interesting as it now surfaces some of the parameters which are usually be preset on a pad controller.
I think this kind of tweak-ability is a welcome thing and it hints at the possibilities for fine tuning the pad algorithms to suit an individual pad musician, just in the same way a regular drummer might tweak their real drums here and there to get just the right feel and response.
At the moment manufacturers are giving us products which are all-purpose devices, that look kind of cool. I wonder which manufacturer will be the first to figure out there’s a market for a finely crafted device especially for ‘pad musicians’ - where the focus is accurate pad hit detection, feel and response.
3 Likes
Hi Stuart,
Do you document your progress/code somewhere? I have a bunch of arduinos I can experiment with, and some day I might want to replicate/continue the project…
Not at this stage. I’m just hacking around with bits of existing code at the mo. When I’ve figured out a few more things I’ll make some tidy code for sharing.
1 Like