Drums are an exciting instrument to learn to play, but often prohibitive if there are housemates or close neighbors involved. For that problem there are still electronic drums which can be played much more quietly, but then the problem becomes one of price. To solve at least part of that one, [Jeremy] turned to using an Arduino to build a drum module on his own, but he still had to solve yet a third problem: how to make the Arduino fast enough for the drums to sound natural.

Playing music in real life requires precise timing, so the choice of C++ as a language poses some problems as it’s not typically as fast as lower-level languages. It is much easier to work with though, and [Jeremy] explains this in great detail over a series of blog posts detailing his drum kit’s design. Some of the solutions to the software timing are made up for with the hardware on the specific Arduino he chose to use, including an even system, a speedy EEPROM, hardware timers, and an ADC that can sample at 150k samples per second.

With that being said, the hardware isn’t the only thing standing out on this build. [Jeremy] has released the source code on his GitHub page for those curious about the build, and is planning on releasing several more blog posts about the drum kit build in the near future as well. This isn’t the only path to electronic drums, though, as we’ve seen with this build which converts an analog drumset into a digital one.

If your interest has been piqued by the inexpensive wireless-enabled goodness of the ESP8266 microcontroller, but you have been intimidated by the slightly Wild-West nature of the ecosystem that surrounds it, help is at hand. [Alexander] is creating a series of ESP8266 tutorials designed to demystify the component and lead even the most timid would-be developer to a successful first piece of code.

If you cast your mind back to 2014 when the ESP8266 first emerged, it caused great excitement but had almost no information surrounding it. You could buy it on a selection of modules, but there were no English instructions and no tools to speak of. A community of software and hardware hackers set to work, resulting in a variety of routes into development including the required add-ons to use the ever-popular Arduino framework. Four years later we have a mature and reliable platform, with a selection of higher-quality and well supported boards to choose from alongside that original selection.

The tutorials cover the Arduino and the ESP, as well as Lua and the official SDK. They are written for a complete newcomer, but the style is accessible enough that anyone requiring a quick intro to each platform should be able to gain something.

Our community never ceases to amaze us with the quality of the work that emerges from it. We’ve seen plenty of very high quality projects over the years, and it’s especially pleasing to see someone such as [Alexander] giving something back in this way. We look forward to future installments in this series, and you should keep an eye out for them.

What do you program the Arduino in? C? Actually, the Arduino’s byzantine build processes uses C++. All the features you get from the normal libraries are actually C++ classes. The problem is many people write C and ignore the C++ features other than using object already made for them. Just like traders often used pidgin English as a simplified language to talk to non-English speakers, many Arduino coders use pidgin C++ to effectively code C in a C++ environment. [Bert Hubert] has a two-part post that isn’t about the Arduino in particular, but is about moving from C to a more modern C++.

Even those of us who use C++ often use what we think of as “classic” C++. More or less the C++ that started life as a preprocessor in front of the C compiler. C++ has changed a lot since then, though. [Bert] looks mostly at useful features from the C++ 2014 standard which is widely available in compilers now. He only talks a little about some 2017 features. He doesn’t, however, talk about super new features or very specialized features that probably won’t be your first stop in a transition from C.

In particular, [Bert] doesn’t cover multiple inheritance, template metaprogramming, a big chunk of iostreams, C++ locales, user-defined literals, or exotics. Just to motivate you, he shows an example where calling the C library to sort a large array is slower than the code using C++ templates that take advantage of parallelism. While this is a special case, it does show that C++ isn’t just “another way to write the same thing.” You could write a faster sort in C, but you’d be writing a lot of code, not just pulling in a library.

What he does cover is strings, namespaces, classes, smart pointers, threads and error handling. Some of these will be more useful on the Arduino than others, but if you are writing for other platforms like a PC or a Raspberry Pi you could use all of them. He’s planning on adding more items in future installments of the series.

Meanwhile, we had our own story about modern C++ and the Arduino last year. If you want to know more about templates, we’ve talked about that, too.

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Hello!

After the previous successful but heavy automatic parachute system*

*(If you didn't see the previous article please visit it here, as it has all the explanations about the electronics and way of working. All improvements are based on that one)

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In this project I will

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I'm currently a sophomore at Worcester Polytechnic Institute studying Robotics Engineering. The third course in the series, RBE 2002, focusing on sensors. In a group of 4 students, we built a robot that could autonomously navigate a maze, locate a flame, put it out and report its X,Y, and Z position relative to its starting position. The robot was required to use an IMU and a flame sensor provided to us. All other sensors and parts are up to the group to use to complete the challenge.

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I'm currently a sophomore at Worcester Polytechnic Institute studying Robotics Engineering. The third course in the series, RBE 2002, focusing on sensors. In a group of 4 students, we built a robot that could autonomously navigate a maze, locate a flame, put it out and report its X,Y, and Z position relative to its starting position. The robot was required to use an IMU and a flame sensor provided to us. All other sensors and parts are up to the group to use to complete the challenge.

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