Echo Drum is a physical drum set that designed to provide people new ways of playing drum without actually using drum set but can also play with drum in physical and interactive way. Our goal for the Echo Drum is to give an interesting experience of playing drum with your friends or families and also make more people having fun with music in an innovative way. We decide to call it Echo Drum because it is the combination of our name pronunciation and also we want to create the echo that inspires more people to enjoy playing with our drum.
Instead of using speaker as sound output, we decided to connect our Arduino to the garageband to make the sound. Also, one advantage of garageband is that once you change the output of the instrument, you can get different sound like piano, guitar etc. Then we check many examples and found out the way Arduino board connected to garageband is using the MIDI input and the once the garageband sense the MIDI input, we can play the garageband in physical way.
At the beginning, we found out a website called open- e-drums which has many open resources about how to make e-drum and the website introduce a library to build E-drum on Github called "Hello Drum". Under the library, there are many examples on it. However, when we test the example, we find out the Hello Drum library doesn't work for Arduino Nano 33. After we check the reference, we found out the Hello Drum library could only work with Uno and Mega. So we started to use Uno instead of Nano to test the library.
When we are going over how the source code, we find out how Hello Drum work is by transferring different parts of drum like Snare and Cymbol into specific byte and function and use MIDI library to send the note. However, the problem is that when we are using the UNO board, we find out the connecting UNO and computer MIDI needs MIDI connector or online MIDI Serial bridge since the UNO board doesn't have the bluetooth module. Since we don't have MIDI connector, we tried to download the Hairless and Ardumo software. Another problem came out at this point. Since the Ardumo and Hairless MIDI didn't update for the macOS.
After that, we found out ESP32 also work for the Hello Drum library. We use the ESP 32 and want to connect to our Arduino through Ble-midi library, but we still fail in the end because we are not familiar with how ESP32 board work.