Drum Trigger - Microphone

After many failed attempts with the Piezo, I asked for help from Joel Murphy and the people of Super Uber. Both of them suggested me to use a microphone instead.


In this case, the microphone embedded in the drum pad can connect to the PC directly through a phone plug.

The microphone can pick up the volume of the drumbeats. The fact that it's inside the drum pad also helps eliminating audio input that doesn't result from the drum beating.
Read more!

Drum Controller - Piezo

Many DIY tutorials suggest embedding a Piezo sensor inside the drum pad, which picks up vibrations. To stabilize the sensor's reading, additional circuits using an OpAmp module are also recommended.

The output of the sensor is sent to a microcontroller, which in turn is connected to a PC using a Serial-USB cable.

For the microcontrollers, I have tried an Arduino and a PIC16F88 chip. On the PC's end, I have attempted to visualize the data with openFrameworks and Processing.

The results indicate that the input from the Piezo sensor can be noisy and unstable. So far, connecting the Piezo sensor directly to the Arduino produces the best results; nevertheless, the data requires filtering and edge detection before it could be used.

On the other hand, when the sensor is used with an OpAmp module, the microcontroller will get a reading that doesn't change even when the drum is hit.
Read more!