Hand-drum with Analog Zero

I'm hoping to make a digital hang/hand drum as a gift for my partner. I've got SamplerBox running on a Pi 3 A+ (this is amazing software by the way, so great that it's openly available!). I want to use an Analog Zero by RasPiO to connect piezo triggers to the Pi, and trigger SamplerBox, with velocity sensitivity. Has anyone done this before? I found a project called eXaDrums, which uses the Analog Zero to make a drum machine, but I don't have the expertise to mix this with SamplerBox. Any ideas would be gratefully received!

Thank you

Hi Miles,
It hasn't been done, but it's an interesting idea to use the Analog Zero as input instead of MIDI.

I think you should drive this device directly, with an approach similar the GPIO buttons (using the analog approach of the AnalogZero) and the note-on logic directly called from the GPIO thread. Since you want to drum, you don't need the note-off logic (this has a caveat on notes cleanup, but I think it that's fixable as I did so in my alternative fork in the midi callback which you now skip).

Alternative way is to have a separate thread running for the Analog Zero handling and let that generate midi signals via the MIDI-through of the PI so you can use the standard note-on/note-off handling of the midi callback. This is a bit cleaner, but blocks the way for other usage of the the midi through.

Since samplerbox takes care of sound generation, mixing with eXaDrums makes no sense.

Bottom-line: I called it "interesting" with the undertone of "a bit complex".

A ESP32 could be a choice too. I has 10 touch-sensitive inputs and a lot of analog inputs. I believe, it would be possible to create a small device which outputs normal MIDI-Signal which You could feed into the samplerbox without any modification of the code of samplerbox. I had used it already in another project but I didn´t create MIDI-Events and as far I could remember, it was possible to identify how fast You touch something when comparing the current tocuh-values with the average of the last values. The bad thing: the values from one touch-sensitive pin differed totally from one pin to the next one. In my case more than 70%. I measured each and then I put these values directly into the code. Perhaps other developers try to implement a calibration-routine into it when You start your application and store the calibration in the EPROM. I used adhesive copperfoil to create small touchsensors.