Roland SPD30 MIDI extension

I have this Roland SPD30 digital percussion pad and Alesis DM6 electronic drum kit. I like SPD30 sound and that you can customize it to your needs. Roland pads are nice, but you cannot play them like real drums. But you can expand it using external pads and hi-hat control. Unfortunately, there are only 4 inputs, so you can only set up, for example, hi-hat, snare, kick, and ride. I wanted to have a full drum experience, so I came up with a solution.

The Roland SPD30 also has MIDI input (DIN5 and USB). With a bunch of laying around electronic components, I have built a MIDI extension. Basically, it's just 4 analog inputs on Arduino (protected with a diode and resistor) that are connected to piezo triggers on Alesis DM6 pads. There is even a dedicated Arduino library for this called HelloDrum. Another useful library is the Arduino MIDI library, which lets you send MIDI data using a UART serial interface. I'll be testing this design now for a few days. I like the way all parts came together to fit in a small enclosure that's been collecting dust for many years.

Arduino hand programable PLC training station

To properly test my new device I came up with this training station like design that fits in the smallest case I could find. I like how everything fits so well and is so portable now. There is even room for some addons (which I planned because PLC has i2c extension port). But the main benefit of this is that everytime when I make a project like that after some time is put in some sort of box. But now when it has this dust/damage protection it wont get lost anywhere I can return to it when ever I want.

Raspberry-PI Function Block Diagrams

In order to learn something new I like to get my hands dirty with new technology rather then buy expensive book and do things step by step. I don't have as much time as I used to. So looking at new framework I'm trying to find out if I can to stuff easier. As you can see by my last posts I was working on a PLC device that can be programmed without computer using only buttons. That came out to be very interesting device to make and I'm still working on it because it's so much fun. A new idea came to my mind to make a PLC that unfortunately will need PC but will provide programming software on its own. It will be a raspberry PI which will host a webpage that you can connect to using ethernet/WIFI then draw functional block desing using front-end application and deploy code that will immediately run. I'm trying to find best (easiest) technologies for this purpose. As of now I'm testing if they will work together. Wish me luck :P