College of Engineering Unit:
Crossing the boundary of music and electro-mechanical systems, the OctoDrum is an autonomous device that performs on an 8-note steel tongue drum, executing inhuman musical feats. The OctoDrum can be controlled externally by industry-standard music software, perform its own autonomously generated sequences, or through human interaction with its distance sensors. The system's ATSAMD51 Cortex M4-based microcontroller communicates with the mallet driver circuitry using serial peripheral interface and the ADC and distance sensors via I2C protocol. The external music software interfaces with the microcontroller by using standard USB-MIDI music data protocol. Solenoids are used to actuate each mallet arm at high frequencies with low latency. Our 3-solenoid actuator design allows it to play at different volumes, soft, medium, and loud, by actuating different numbers of solenoids. Ensuring that the entire team plus our project customer met each week throughout the project was a key challenge because of our relatively large interdisciplinary team of six engineers. Despite this challenge, these consistent meetings fostered a shared vision and allowed the project to flourish in the long-run. For the future, overhauling the PCB layout to be modular would allow for each mallet arm to be positioned separately. This would allow our actuator design to play any variety of percussion instruments. Lastly, another area for improvement is to make the user interface more configurable for the modular design by implementing an OLED screen with a 5-way navigation switch.
