shinyhappyrainbows

Gotta say, I'm pretty chuffed with this project! Yeah, the repo's still a bit messy, I've yet to mount the electronics, even in prototype form, on the drumkit yet, but I have basic hardware test code working and a basic MIDI operated, non-blocking, Arduino-driven, four-piece kit capable C language package ready to run an Uno or Nano board driving 11 channels of percussion via 11 MOSFET buffers to switch the 24v actuator supply. Most are dynamic, ie: they have velocity, using the analogWrite() command, a few are simple digitalWrite() commands. This video shows an initial test run of the simple hardware test code... I have to admit, the MIDI driver code is probably still a bit unreadable, too. I'm trying to work towards flexible CAD models that can be given presets for popular drum kit product lines and Arduino code that can be scaled to a number of compatible boards, both 16 bit and 32 bit, with sufficient analog pins to run multiple beaters per percussion instrument (

Bugger me, this design task has been breaking my brain! But I've broken its back, I think. At rest, they're locked off at the "sizzle" position. Lift the top hat to open them for a ringing sound. Lift the bottom one to close them for the "tick." Tiss, tiss, tiss, ting^-suppˇ! The rest is just a matter of four solenoids, one to lift the bottom hat, one to lift the top hat, on for left beater and one to operate the right beater. "What the HELL are you raving about, Crunchy?!" you ask. The robotic drums, silly!!! Since I gave up on ever getting a usable way of having car door lock actuators to operate quickly enough to make it work like a "real drummer", and went with solenoids for motive force, the "hats" have been bugging me. It was as simple as using two clutches! You know, the thing that holds the top cymbal on the rod which the pedal pulls down! Bottom cymbal loosely over the pedal riser, held in plase by a lifting mech, to

The linear rails modified Ender-3 has its new, high flow, high heat hot end and printed lift feet for the new telly. No new land speed records, like what killed the cheap nasty hotend, but this was a cosmetic print, anyway. But seriously, these machines are like an abusive partner we keep going back to. They rarely fail at the start of a print or, if they do, it's your fault for not setting it up right. No, most of the time, they'll fail ten minutes from the end and waste most of the roll of your most expensive, least recyclable filament. Still, we makers keep patching up the beast in what looks, from the outside, like a bad case of sunk cost fallacy. Today, this "grandfather's axe" of a machine delivered. I must have modded it enough to have doubled its AU$300 ticket price, so it bloody well ought to deliver, but it really delivered. It's only a practical print, the new telly doesn't quite have enough clearence underneath its stumpy by elegant legs for

" To create, you have to break the rules, you have to break your own rules, " ~ high wire artist Phillipe Petit. That is all

Forgive my phone's camera, it's only an iPhone SE and its camera only does digital zoom. However, take a look at this 3D print, currently coming "out of the glass." That is NOT the "fuzzy skin" setting in my slicer! That's the natural look of the carbon fibre impregnated PETG I'm printing with. The tiny carbon strands are fizzing up in the hot paste and making such a matte finish that you can't see the layer lines! This printer has never printed so well before! This is my first, serious structural part print since I upgraded this machine from the stock v-wheels to linear rails. This was an AU$200 upgrade kit, so I expected good quality prints but I also expected more linear layers, too, more prounounced in other words. And they sort of are with plain, glassy PLA. A little bit. To me, this print, side-on at least, looks like it's been printed in a laser 3D printer - laser melted nylon granules. This finish is one of the attractions in the 3

Wow! What a productive couple of weeks in the workshop. (Not "the \'shop", In Australia, a shop is where you buy bread and milk. Light industrial work happens in a workshop. Ignorant #seppos.*) I have repaired a picnic table as light work table, mounted my drill press on a mobile trolley on casters, started redesigning and building my robot drums, begun turning my 240x180x50 CNC router "toy" into a 1000x500x50 CNC tool, got my trusty Ender 3 upgraded to linear rails and 32 bit control, running Marlin 2.1.2.4 (the latest at time of writing) and printed some of said drum robart parts. In all of that, I have modified my new trigger clamps to work interchangeably with clapming force or spreading force. Used the old 18x240 T-slot bed from the "toy" CNC as my drill press table AND mounted the cross slide on that with T-nuts, so that I can clamp jobs or do fine jobs or high accuracy jobs. It's like my ADHD staged a coup on my autism and decided to be pro