We've Met Kick-Bot, Now Meet Stick-Bot

Currently on the printer... (Yeah, now long finished, like a day or two ago as I finish this post.

I'm still waiting for another car door motor to arrive from the seller, but the mech for stick bot, with little more than a finger flick, makes a really nice, sharp, toppy "CRACK" on my piccolo wood snare. (I love that snare, so toppy and eighties! Yet full bodied. Tin snares suck.) I've designed this so that it'd be possible to CNC out of wood or aluminim, with plenty of mount holes for brackets or poles. No thingiverse entry yet, but I'll get that up as I organise the design and generalise mounting hardwares to suit a range of drums and cymbals. Here's a demo vid...

The firmware will have provision for treating MIDI Snare 1 and 2 (or combos of tom or hi-hat notes, depending on application) as left or right stick, as well as a protocol for detecting if a left ot right hat hit was in close enough proximity that a human drummer wouldn't be able to play tat beat, therefore handoff to the opposite stick if it's not busy. Of course, that stuff is better programmed into the drum machine patterns used, but sometimes a factory pattern designed by an engineer sounds so good, right, even if impossible to play as a human!

Each Stick-Bot, single or pair, will be a stand-alone MIDI instrument with hardware through, just like Kick-Bot, or still being assembled Hat-Bot. The system will be daisy-chained from the drum machine, through the kick, snare, hat and so on. Each programmed to look for its particular note or notes on MIDI channel 10.

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