Thanks to Nordic Semiconductor for highlighting this system in their latest Wireless Quarter. Freedrum is actually a fellow Nordic company being based in Sweden. “Play the drums anytime, anywhere,” is their slogan.
The full setup comprises four lightweight devices to detect movement: one attached to each drumsticks and one for each of the drummer’s feet. These are wirelessly connected via Bluetooth LE using a Nordic nRF5232 SoC-powered and a MIDI.
The Freedrum Complete Kit costs £176, but a starter kit, with two devices costs £126.
Apparently, built-in gyroscopes and accelerometers track the direction and angle of attack of the drumsticks. And these are then translated to drum noises, according to the relevant area hit.
The six elements of the virtual drumkit are: snare, floor tom, ride cymbal, high tom, crash and hi-hat. And their relative positions can be tweaked via the associated app (Android or iOS). Check out the setup process.
All importantly, you can listen to your drumming as you play without any sound proofing being required!
“Without the wireless functionality of MIDI-over-Bluetooth LE this product would be impossible,” August Bering, Freedrum’s founder and inventor, told Nordic. “Cables would take the ‘free’ out of Freedrum. We’re an alternative for people who don’t want to buy a bigger house to have a room for their hobby.”
It carries up to 14 hours of battery life, and to charge the sensors takes one hour, say the creators.
You can find out more online (there’s an FAQ here).
Virtual drums
In this area, also check out the work of recent EW BrightSpark Yanislav Donchev.
During his second year of university, he told us, he realised the annoyances that come with playing drums, being loud, expensive, and cumbersome. He thought it would be a great business opportunity to find a solution and so gathered two of his brightest fellow students and formed a team to create an air drumming device.
Later, he individually pitched his idea to the student enterprise team of the university and secured two substantial funds for market research and prototyping. As a third-year project, he continued the research on building the product which resulted in a production ready device. It consists of sensor-fitted drumsticks with a compact design, custom-built PCB, and feature-rich software.
Two of these drumsticks and a mobile phone was everything needed to be able to play drums. Later, this project was awarded the best embedded-systems third-year project at a TechWorks gala event.
Song of the wind
And talking of Michael Shrieve…
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdmevPWZTRg[/embed]
See also: Drumming the binary bongo input device
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