MIDI Slap Tubes
- Hack Details: I’m a musician and a dad. To get the kids interested in music and hacking and the physics of sound I sometimes get them building homemade musical instruments – you know, dried pea shakers, rubber band guitars etc. I saw this video earlier in the year and have wanted to make one ever since. http://makezine.com/2010/12/01/theyre-called-slap-tubes/ Then my tech head got involved and I thought I’d love to make a MIDI-able Slap Tube. I’m thinking that Arduino, Solenoids to make the slap and something to read and translate the MIDI files. Can we build, compose and perform the SciHackDay theme tune?
- What you need to make it happen?: Plumbing Tubes, Arduinos, MIDI Interface, Solenoids, Flip Flops!
- Name: Stuart Lawn
- Twitter/website: @stulawntweets
Top
I might have a STM32F103 based protoboard with MIDI input ready by that time(*), and bring some MIDI keyboard with myself. And perhaps a single solenoid (that’s all I have now) and some MOSFETs. Would that be useful?
Hi Krzysztof, That sounds great. I have bought 8 solenoids and some mosfets too, so hopefully that will be enough to get at least an octave going. The solenoids are kinda smaller than I thought they would be so hopefully they will have enough force to make a good slap! Look forward to seeing you Saturday.
Do you have anything specific in mind for protecting the mosfets against inductive load from the solenoid, and the microcontroller outputs from accidental shorts?
I’ve got the optoisolation part of the MIDI input running yesterday, but didn’t check if the rest of my badly soldered board survived it. I’ll try to bring some arduino clone as a spare, just in case, but anything bad can happen.