In Guitar Hero with its drums

A friend of mine recently started to realize his rather old dream - to play drums. But almost immediately a problem arose: there was nowhere to practice except in courses. The student budget narrows the scope even further. To help, it was decided to collect a simple practise pad, in order to simply develop the technique. Further more. And it’s getting better with Guitar Hero!

PS: Everything has already been collected and transferred to another city, so there will not be many photos.

PPS: Updated video!

The design is based on a wooden board with dimensions of 800x170. We cut it into 5 equal parts, 4 of which are ready for use, and the fifth will be cut into half and 2 quarters. Half will be the basis for the pedal, legs will be obtained from the rest with a chaotic cut.



The next step will be the manufacture of surfaces. We need an elastic material that can compensate for the shock and muffle the sound. To do this, take two car mats. We cut out 2 circles with a diameter of about 15 cm on each pad, glue it with the usual moment without a press, in order to maintain elasticity due to the original relief of the rugs.



At the same moment, but with the use of force, we glue the wooden legs to the far edge of the surface. It turned out the most common praxis.



Further, the boundary area of ​​mechanics and electronics. We have two stationary points of support, to which we add a third, functional, which will be a closure to fix the impact. Realizations of the third “leg” can be thought up quite a lot, under the cut are collected all the failed decisions.

In the end, such a system turned out. As contacts, pads were used for the spatula. They are quite elastic and conduct current.



We revive everything with a finished keyboard I / O board. Solder one wire to the x coordinate, it will be common to all, and five wires to the y coordinate. There isn’t much difference to which symbols the matches will correspond, but just in case, it’s better to “ring” all the values ​​with the wiring in order to choose the most convenient ones, like 1, 2, 3, 4.

Pre-final view



Now we connect the devices to the board, we check for operability. After making sure that the system is working, we proceed to the calibration. We open a text editor, put the drums in a row and beat each one in turn. We sign drums from left to right: green, red, yellow, blue, and the values ​​of their clicks remain in our textbook.

We open the Guitar Hero configuration file, which lies in the bowels of appdata, in the aspyr folder, and is called config.xml. By default, keys from 1 to 4 and a few more are used. We swap the keys according to the location of our reels and save the file.

We launch Guitar Hero to the fanfare from the introductory videos, and ... everything works!



Budget:
- a wooden shield, 120r
- rugs, 240r
- pads for a spatula, 600r
- glue, 50r
- a keyboard from bins
Total: 1010r

As a result, an almost fully-functional controller was obtained, but its functions are enough to play. The goal, oddly enough, justified the means, overpowered the joy of the possibility of "knocking on something". A significant share of the budget is made up of pads, and if you repeat something like this, it would be better to replace them with a spring with two contacts.