Light attack drum kit has arrived!

It's finally here!  The light attack drum kit.

I needed to change my drum heads, and since I need to take off the heads to install these boards, I decided to put on the new heads.  Now... this marks the second time I've ever replaced drum heads, and I realize they aren't tuned correctly (see video below).   You got any tips?  Let me know!

Of course, installing all this equipment made me realize all the mistakes I made...  I put the sensitivity adjustment on the board that's in the drum, so when I want to adjust the sensitivity I need to take off the drum heads to do it, then without the resonant head, the whole response changes, so I keep taking off and replacing the head... which gets very old, very fast.  Ooops.

So, here's the board inside my floor tom.  I used corner brace to attach the board to the shell, and just screwed it right into the lug for the drum heads.  I got some of those nifty removable 3M cable holders to hold the cable in place and provide some strain relief. 

Oh this reminds me of my second mistake... the corner brace is metal, the board doesn't have a solder mask, and if the board happens to not be aligned correctly, the corner brace will short the power and ground.  Oooops.  Some electrical tape on the leads will be a quick fix.

 I used a 3.5mm audio cable to connect to the control box, and I just ran them out the vent holes in the drums.  Unfortunately, the cable was to thick to fit through the vent hole, so I had to use a blade to trim some of the plastic off of the connector.  Again... ooops.

Anyways... After a few hours getting the bass drum light tested one night, and then another night and another few hours getting the rest of the drums hooked up, I have a working kit!  The sensitivity of the LEDs isn't quite right, especially for the snare.  The snare lights up whenever I hit the bass drum, and the first rack tom stays on far too long.  By the time I'd gone through all of this install, I figured I'd just make a little video and muck around taking off the heads and fine tuning the sensitivity some other day.  By the end of this "testing" the snare drum had quit working...  I'm hoping it's a loose connection, but we'll see.

Anyway, we rounded up some friends around the practice space and invited them in to check it out, which is all of the laughing you'll hear.  Oh, and I'm a professional engineer, not a professional drummer...

Questions? Comments?  Soundularelectronics@gmail.com