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What's in a Name?

A project log for Drum Master

Electric drum set based on Teensy 3.1 and Audio Board

the-big-oneThe Big One 08/22/2015 at 20:315 Comments

I normally try to name my projects with a non-English name or some variation on an existing word. This is for a few reasons, the least of which is to allow search engines to get better matches.

Drum Master is obviously the exception to this. It was one of my earliest projects (in its original form), and I was young and foolish.

I am now trying to come up with a decent project name, but am hitting brick walls with my train of thought. Does anyone have any suggestions? I'm listening!

Cheers

Discussions

Jeremy wrote 08/23/2015 at 14:39 point

That's a difficult task for sure!

I usually choose a name that is in relation with the most important piece of hardware, or what makes the project original.

In your case, I would say something related to Teensy, if that's still what you're going to use... I'm actually a bit confused about the hardware you're using. Are you using the Raspberry Pi + Teensy audio board, or something else?

Anyway, it looks like google doesn't know "Teensy-Drums". That's just an idea, Hopefully that helps.

Cheers

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The Big One wrote 08/23/2015 at 14:44 point

Ahh good call.  I like TeensyDrums... or perhaps "Teensy Drummer Boy"?  (come, they told me...) ;-)

The hardware is a Teensy + Audio board + custom board for ADC filtering and multiplexing.  I experimented with using an AVR + Raspberry Pi, but didn't like the results (I didn't want to require boot times on a drum set, and having to run 'apt-get upgrade' on a drum set just felt wrong) so I dropped it.

Cheers

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Jeremy wrote 08/23/2015 at 16:19 point

Haha, Teensy Drummer Boy, that's good! 

I'm working on a similar project, and I use the Raspberry Pi. 

How was the latency with the Pi? I'm recording more than 20ms, and I can't reduce it, even though I'm using the alsa api in a c program to play the sounds... Is that because of the Pi's soundcard? Would an audio codec help? (I saw you pretty much did this)

Cheers

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The Big One wrote 08/23/2015 at 17:02 point

I didn't do any scientific measurements of latency with the Pi, but I didn't notice anything bad either.  (20ms should have been noticeable).  I was using pygame for the playback.  If you look in my github repo from about February or so, you should see the python script that I used, if you want to play with it.

How are you loading the sounds?  If you play from SD card each time that would significantly add to latency.  If you can, try preloading the sounds into memory.  If done right, I can't think of any reason why you should be seeing even 5ms of latency, let alone 20+.  Do you have a project page for this project?  I could take a look and see if anything jumps out at me.

Cheers

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Jeremy wrote 08/23/2015 at 17:08 point

All the sounds are preloaded into the memory. I'll take a look at your github.
I'm
working on a project page, I'll tell you when it's done, but there are a
few things I'd like to fix before I publish anything.
Cheers

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