It’s 2015. Wireless instruments are the future of performance and electronic musicianship. A completely portable one will help you make music easily (and you can leave the heavy instrument, midi controller, and looping pedal at home). Now, you can invent a beat or melody, and tap it out on your body—just like you already do.
Use all four limbs, like a real drummer. Make music in ways not possible with an MPC or tabletop MIDI controller.
Connect wirelessly to iPad/iPhone and Mac laptops with Apple’s native MIDI over Bluetooth LE protocol for the lowest latency playability.
Class-compliant MIDI USB instrument. Control 300+ MIDI/OSC apps.
Upload and use your own custom sounds for infinite possibilities.
Works with headphones and portable speakers, so you can play anywhere.
Built in metronome to help you stay on beat.
DrumPants works great as a low-cost looping pedal with apps such as Loopy.
Use DrumPants and our app on mobile & desktop for Android, iOS, and Windows.
Beyond music related activities, you can also control other connected devices.
We are looking for a community of users and testers. If interested, you can help by pledging to our campaign and by signing up for our DrumPants TAC mailing list to learn more: http://bit.ly/DrumPants-TACS
We spent a lot of time with our backers from our first campaign, and have improved our features and experience immensely with their feedback in the areas of reliability, latency, and design. Now, we’re putting on the final polish and making our DrumPants apps compatible with our newest firmware. All current DrumPants owners get the 2.0 improvements through a free, downloadable firmware upgrade.
Check out our before and after pictures of product design, look, and experience:
All of our hardware and firmware will be customizable, upgradable, and have the power of the open source community constantly improving it.
We hope it will provide an educational base for many Bluetooth musical instruments to come: as a solid codebase to make your own DIY instruments, and as a reference for other musical instrument manufacturers to implement MIDI over Bluetooth LE.
We’re currently sold out on DrumPants kits and this campaign allows us to make our next batch.
DrumPants are an Arduino-compatible device. Upload your own Arduino sketches for maximum hackability! It’s like having an Arduino Due with Bluetooth LE module ready for your DIY projects.
We built the DrumPants with DIY creators in mind. You can use it as a brain for your own piezo drum triggers, or plug in any kind of resistive sensor to send MIDI CC data with bend sensors, photoresistive light detectors, ribbon sliders, and more!
Product and packaging are ready to go:
Our supply chain is set up and has made DrumPants before:
WHAT ARE YOU MAKING OPEN SOURCE?
Upon successful funding of the campaign, we will organize, document, and release all schematics and original design files for the DrumPants PCB, including the BOM, circuit diagrams, and PCB layout files.
We will also release the firmwares needed to run the hardware: an Arduino Due library+sketch for converting sensor data into individual hits and MIDI messages, the UI (LED control and knob/buttons), and EEPROM memory/storage management. It will also include a patch to the Arduino project source code for a class-compliant USB MIDI implementation on the Arduino Due ARM processor.
We will also release the source for our firmware for the Bluetooth module (Broadcom BCM20736), which converts MIDI messages from the main MCU and sends them over the air. It is a highly speed-optimized implementation for adding the headers and timestamps necessary for communicating with iOS and Mac (and hopefully soon Android and Windows) devices using Apple’s MIDI over Bluetooth LE protocol.
Unfortunately, we are not able to open source the DrumPants desktop/mobile apps at this time, since they use commercial libraries that we are not allowed to release publicly. However, since DrumPants 2.0 will be fully MIDI compliant, you can use it without the DrumPants apps.
WHAT COMES WITH THE DEV KIT?
The dev kit is a bare DrumPants PCB. It does not include the DrumPad or foot pedal sensors, nor a battery or plastic enclosure.
It can be powered by the USB port or your own battery. You can attach your own sensors using standard 3.5mm TRRS headphone cables.
DRUMPANTS DETAILED APP SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS & SPECS
RISKS & CHALLENGES
We’ve successfully completed and shipped the first version of DrumPants and we’re using the same suppliers and manufacturers, so there are no major unknowns in our supply chain. Should delays come up, we’ve built in buffer time already. However, any extraneous delays from our component suppliers could delay the ship date.
Our customers have been using DrumPants for 5 months now, and we have gotten great feedback regarding the reliability and durability of our product.
SPECIAL THANKS TO: