Lil' Drum and Bass Bot

Update: After getting a little attention for this bot, i decided to teach him a new tune. His objectivism avoidance still needs some work, but that's really the secondary function anyway ...

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here is my version of the drumbot, lovingly known as Mitch Mitchell (RIP). This guy provides his own soundtrack and drums to it. Like many, I became interested in this site, and robots in general, after seeing the Little Yellow Drum machine. The idea behind this bot was to add my own twist with a soundtrack and different drumming style. It's been a lot of fun programming the different drum styles.

The "body" for this bot is from an old toy motor housing. The perfect size for covering all the wires, speaker, and other robot guts. (Since I have small children, this is a necessity for the bot to have any kind of shelf-life). Plus it just looks cool.

I added slots in the top for interface switches and leds.

The initial draft used a single gm10 drumstick, 2 gm10s for wheels, and was designed to drum on objects and walls. But this had two drawbacks:

- It went TOO fast to avoid hitting everything. In order to play a soundtrack and move, it can only read the IR between notes. 

- The walls in my house aren't very drum-bot friendly.

So I swapped out the motors for 2 GWS modified servos. ("Modified servos" isn't really accurate; they're geared dc motors in a servo case. and they're fraking LOUD), added another drumstick, and made this guy's drumming self-contained. With a shorter distance to drum, I also had a lot more room to improvise with speed, style, etc. 

The input switches on top are used to change the song. The next draft will also let the user switch drums on/off and cycle between songs. Or I'll use some EEPROM to let a human program the drum sequence.