Taiko drum with Arduino and Piezo sensors

Some time ago, I was thinking about how electric drums worked. I wondered what kind of sensor was used to measure hits and velocity. I found out that they were using piezo sensors and decided I would try to make one. Continuing my research, I found out about people making Taiko drum USB controllers. A taiko is a big japanese drum but there also exist an arcade game where you hit a Taiko to play a ryhtm game.

I then followed information that I found on this instructable page https://www.instructables.com/Taiko-Rythm-Game-Open-Controller/

Here is the code I used with some tweaks to the parameters: https://github.com/LuiCat/ArduinoTaikoController

Here is the final build:

The Arduino I used here is a chinese knockoff of an Arduino micro with has an atmega32u4 chip on it. In the Arduino UNO, the USB controller is on a separate chip that only supports serial communication. However, the atmega32u4 integrates the USB controller on the chip which means that we can override the code handling the USB communication.

A very simple library exists to do that with Arduino, it's called MIDIUSB https://docs.arduino.cc/libraries/midiusb/. The midiusb library makes the arduino pretend to be a usb device that speaks the usb-midi class protocol. the pc sees it as a “midi controller” because usb has a standard device class for midi. It doesn't require any additional driver.

Here's a quick demo: