Kiyoshigawa Online

The World of Tim

"I set up my white picket fence in the now, with a commanding view of the soon to be."
     -The Tick

About Tim

Tim Anderson has a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Utah. He is currently working for an Architect, and develops robots as a hobby. Eventually he would like to be employed to work on robots as his primary source of income. His interests include Robotics, Rhythm Games, Myst, Music, RPGs, Web Design, and Anime. Below you will find something vaguely bloglike.

ION Drumrocker and Friends

2008-09-28: So, over the past month or so I have been doing little except play Rock Band 2 and work. I got a new ION Drumrocker kit, and made a couple changes to it for some awesome drumming capabilities. The first simplest change was buying and adding a Roland CY-8 cymbal to the set to act as the yellow cymbal. I made a custom drum kick pad and added a reed switch to it so that it would work with RB2. I still have plans to make a hi-hat switching device that will switch the signal from the yellow and blue drums depending on the position of the hi-hat pedal.

The drum pedal uses a Pearl P900 Power Shifter as its primary method of actuation. Attached to the head of the pedal is a glass reed switch designed to close a circut when it is in the presence of a magnetic field. I then used some laminated pine I had around the house to build a kick pad for the pedal to hit that would have a magnet mounted on it to send a signal to rock band. I used a simple 1/4" Mono jack and plugged in the wire from the ION pedal to there, then ran the leads to the reed switch. Very simple to make the sensor wiring. After doing that, I initially tried to use felt to dampen the impact, and velcro to secure the magnet. When the magnet was held down very well to the velcro, the pedal worked like a charm, with the exception that it was extremely loud. To remedy this, I cut up a gardening kneepad and used it as a cushion. This made the drum very quiet, but had the unintended side effect of making the magnet unstable, resulting in double or triple hits from the vibrations. To remedy this, I took some 1/16" Sheet Steel and cut/bent it to hold the magnet into place. With that done, everything worked perfectly with the exception that when I kicked the same spot on the pad alot, it leaves a lasting indentation and the pad was breaking apart because of this. I added one of the heavy felt pads in front of the soft pad, which makes it slightly louder, but stopped the breaking problem, so it's all good.

Pictures of the entire setup can be found here for your viewing pleasure.