Author: Matt Stultz / Source: Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers
At a Less Than Jake concert I noticed that Vinnie Fiorello’s drums had LED lights inside. They would periodically change colors while the roadie set up the band’s gear, but stayed one solid color during the performance.
Less Than Jake have an energetic live show and these static lights just wouldn’t do — I knew I could build them something better!I needed to make something interactive but small enough to fit entirely into the drum itself. I also knew that there was no way any touring musician would want to pull out a laptop and reprogram an Arduino on stage, so I had to make it easy to make changes on the fly.
THE BRAINS
I chose the Huzzah32 not only for its tidy size, but because I also wanted to take advantage of its Wi-Fi and, potentially in later versions, Bluetooth interfaces. The lights are standard WS2812B LED strips with 60 lights per meter. To capture the drum hits, I used an accelerometer breakout board, the LIS3DH, which supports a tap mode.
I set up the Huzzah32 to be its own access point and server. The name of this access point (“DrumLights”) and its WPA key (“HelloRockview”) can be changed by altering this line in the code: WiFi.softAP(“DrumLights”, “HelloRockview”);. When you connect, you’ll automatically be taken to a webpage on your default browser (I had some issue with this on Android but it worked great on every other OS I tried). If it fails to launch, just point your browser to 192.168.4.1to pull up the configuration page.
On the configuration page you can change three options: Flash, Brightness, and Sensitivity. Flash will make all the lights flash very brightly white for 0.1 second before changing color — a very dynamic effect, but it might be too much for some. Brightness allows you to change how bright the LEDs will be when normally on. Sensitivity determines how hard the drum must be struck to trigger the LEDs; the farther to the right the slider is moved, the harder it is to trigger the color change.
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