I Will Pay For Your Help

I would like to attach an FSR to a piece of wood and tap dance on the wood so that the FSR picks up my tapping (especially the force of each tap) and then sends a midi signal to either a drum module or directly to a laptop.

Currently I have the above setup working using a traditional drum trigger (piezo-electric transducer) sending a signal to an Alesis DM5 drum module but despite by best calibration efforts I am unable to get any useful variance in volume levels.

My hope is that an FSR would solve this problem and give me a wide variance in the volume levels I am able to produce. I am concerned that just standing on a board with an FSR will cause it to continuously trigger. If that continuous triggering is just a single note sustained that would be ok, but if it is a repeat triggering going da-da-da-da-da-da that is no good.

I know nothing about FSRs or how to get them to send midi signals, so you would be doing pretty much all the work.

If you think this is possible could you please contact me with the cost of materials and the cost of you programming whatever needs programmed etc. Thank you!

It looks like these guys have what you need off the shelf: http://www.midicpu.com/

Also SF has a midi shield: SparkFun MIDI Shield - DEV-12898 - SparkFun Electronics

unitedtaps:
Currently I have the above setup working using a traditional drum trigger (piezo-electric transducer) sending a signal to an Alesis DM5 drum module but despite by best calibration efforts I am unable to get any useful variance in volume levels.

I have gotten wide variance from soft touch to hard smacks on piezo disks through diodes to 2 transistors (1 for press, the other for release) with impeded 5V (2.2K resistors) with the emitters jumpered directly to digital pins.

What happens is that the resistor turns on longer or shorter depending on the force of the hit and that fills the wires between BJT and pin with more or less current.

A single digitalRead() eats about 1 microAmp of that charge. Only the lightest touch won't send the pin HIGH (I have them reading the whole time using non-blocking code, the loop runs at over 50KHz.) and then it may take 20 to 50 to over 2000 reads (hit hard with a screwdriver handle) to get the pin back to low.

It's nothing precise (and may vary pin to pin) but is well within ballpark consistent.

If the board bends even a little you could try making the lower surface conductive then putting another conductive surface below and using capacitive sensing techniques to read that.

This is a tricker problem than it might seem. I don't know what an FSR might be, but you might be better off wiring a microphone to the board, amplify, rectifying and smoothing the output with a capacitor, and just using the volume you get from that.

I don't know what an FSR might be

Well, let me help you out..

I really can't see how connecting a boy scout ranch to the Arduino is going to prove useful, but, hey, it could be fun.

PaulS:
Well, let me help you out..
FSR - Wikipedia
I really can't see how connecting a boy scout ranch to the Arduino is going to prove useful, but, hey, it could be fun.

Dyb dyb dyb!

God - that was a long and mercifully brief time ago.

PaulS:
Well, let me help you out..
FSR - Wikipedia
I really can't see how connecting a boy scout ranch to the Arduino is going to prove useful, but, hey, it could be fun.

If you're up to the effort, a couple of weeks there is a couple weeks in heaven. I went in 72, got the patch.